the only time is now

[estimated reading time 8 minutes]

when things go wrong in my life, the most common phrase i hear is “it’ll be ok”. i suspect the same is true in yours. comfort often comes with the certainty, often misplaced but just as often correct, that the future will be better than the present. the other piece that usually accompanies this is the other side of the temporal coin – “you’ve had this happen over and over and it’s always been ok”. the past is a predictor of the future. in other words, dice have memory. that what happened in the past will continue to happen. post hoc ergo procter hoc. after therefore because.

and those things, i am told, are extremely comforting to non-autistics. and, perhaps, to some autistics, too. the story i am telling here is not universal. like all things in autism, there are general rules, things that apply to the majority but not everyone. there is nothing in autism that functions as a catch-all except this – autistics live in worlds of extremes. for us there is no “little painful” or “gentle sensation”. there’s sensation and it feels like nothing or everything. there is no moderate, no middle, no between two points. there’s extreme. for some, that extreme is that you feel nothing. this is what leads to the common autistic presentation of disinterest, social disconnection and separation from the world. it’s often read as lack of emotion. that’s not what it is but it can certainly appear that way. lack of emotion is something else, though that’s common, too.

the other extreme is feeling everything. feeling it so much it hurts. every movement, breath of air moving, fabric, word spoken or read, touch against objects, textures, tastes, smells. they’re all excruciating, extreme, painful to the point of torture. the intent doesn’t matter. even pleasant scents trigger extreme sensory reactions, often flashbacks and obsessive memories, too. tastes and smells are often the strongest triggers but this certainly varies from person to person.

the one constant, however, is that autistics only feel things in extremes. too much or too little. we don’t understand the concept of enough. it doesn’t exist in our lives.

the other thing that almost functions as a constant in autism is the lack of decision-making ability. that’s not quite as universal, though. autistics generally only make decisions in two ways — we let things happen and the decision is made by default or we wait until the decision has to be made out of pure desperation and the decision is then made without thought or consideration, even if there’s been a huge amount of time spent obsessing over it. whether it’s the right choice is irrelevant. it’s just whatever choice comes to mind when there’s absolutely no time left to make it. then it’s over. which brings me to the issue of time, the real idea of interest today. and that’s not a universal, either. but it’s common enough to talk about and be relevant to some, if not most, autistics.

i should probably qualify that. i mean it’s relevant and common among what i tend to refer to as “connected autistics”. there was once a notion of “high-functioning autism” that was based on the idea that some autistics lead normal daily lives while others can’t. that’s an odd distinction because it doesn’t describe the pain that accompanies autistic life every second of the day. but autism is really two completely different disorders with very different impacts on daily life but with the same trigger – extreme sensory perception. that’s the linking factor.

those who are “connected” to the world are those who can communicate and participate in daily life in a way those who are “disconnected” can’t. this is usually a question of what is seen as “intelligence”. that’s not actually what it is. it’s got a lot more to do with communicative language but that, too, is a subject for another day. the simple result is that some autistics function in human society by speaking and listening, having conversations, usually conversations they don’t want to have with those who are irrelevant to them simply because of the need of society to constantly impose itself on their lives. then there are those who can’t have conversations, usually because they don’t speak and often don’t seem to understand what they hear, either. these are “disconnected autistics” and what i write generally has little to do with that group, though the underlying cause is much the same and, i expect, what i have to say about time likely applies to them, too. but it’s hard to tell for obvious reasons.

time, though, is difficult for the subgroup of connected autistics i refer to as “present autistics” or “presents”. in disclosure, i am a member of this group and nearly all autistics i have communicated with are similarly but it’s not universal.

presents live, as the name implies, in the present. of course, all humans live in the present. that seems like a truly useless statement. but it means something different for us. if you are a non-autistic, you live in a world constructed of expectations based on the past but most of what you are doing in your life is about constructing a future. that future is extremely important to you. you are prepared to suffer now for a better future. actually, that’s the entire basis for most common world religions — present suffering and self-denial in exchange for an eternity of (in christianity) blissful coexistence with deities or (in islam) the reward of physical pleasure or (in hinduism) escape from a world of pain, etc. autistics tend not to be very religious. religions are built for non-autistics who have a future-and-past understanding of time. let’s explore that.

time is a (potentially-infinite) continuum. we live in the present but we are the aftereffect of our past decisions and what we do now creates the future. that’s not a belief system. it’s simply how the physics of time works.

but if you’re a present, only one of those periods matters at all. the past has disappeared. people who talk about the past are speaking of something that has only theoretical importance. talking about what happened yesterday or last year is only as relevant to us as what happened in antiquity or the middle ages. it might be absolutely fascinating from an academic, detached perspective. but it has no emotional content or functional relevance to us. we are conceptually confused by things like prison. what a person did yesterday is causing them to be locked in a room today. but what they did yesterday is over. it happened yesterday. why is that relevant to their current physical state?

the story of the grasshopper and the ant has always struck me as an odd moral lesson. i’m sure you know the story. the ant arduously struggles to build a storage area and fill it with food for the coming winter while the grasshopper plays all day and relaxes. you know what’s coming. the winter hits and the ant is happy and ends up taking pity on the regretful grasshopper who has learned their lesson. this is often given as a morality tale to tell people they have to think about the future. and that’s fine. but the real lesson is that you have to learn from history and make detailed plans. and that’s not a problem for autistics. even presents. we do ritual. we do preparation and anticipation. we do expectations. what we don’t do is function in a way where they matter.

i know. that’s confusing. so let’s imagine i’m the grasshopper. the ant tells me i have to prepare for the winter and i don’t listen. so i am starving in the winter and i learn my lesson. i should have listened to the ant. thanks, ant. i’ll do it better next time. so the next summer is full of preparation for the winter. why am i doing it? because now it’s the programmed ritual for summer. am i particularly interested in the winter? no. thinking about having enough to eat? no. it’s because this is what i do in the summer. this is my present task. it’s what i do every day not because of the future, simply because it’s what i’ve been assigned to do. why i’m doing it makes no difference.

i once had a conversation with my father. he wanted me to change a particular behavior. no problem. he had done a huge amount of research, it seemed, into the dangers of what i was currently doing and it could cause problems. and he shared his reasons for asking me. that’s fine but i was confused by it. i was disposing of something in the toilet and he wanted me to dispose of it differently. why was i confused? because i didn’t understand plumbing? well, i don’t. but that’s got nothing to do with it. i was confused because he was explaining to me a potential future scenario that was disastrous. and he was explaining his reason for asking me like the justification was relevant. and that seems to be how non-autistics or even autistic non-presents think about things. but all he needed to do was say “can you do this for me?” and that was enough. not just that it was enough, though, which is perhaps even more confusing. all those reasons were irrelevant to me. i don’t care about the future. it doesn’t matter. prevent disaster in the future? not something i ever think about. for me, the future is an unimaginable nightmare. yes, unimaginable. i imagine future nightmare scenarios constantly. they are my constant obsession. i am, however, absolutely certain the future will be some nightmare i haven’t imagined. literally unimaginable.

what does this really mean in practice, though? it means the past doesn’t matter and the future is irrelevant until it happens.

let’s look at an example. i am in constant and extreme physical pain particularly in my stomach. it constantly feels like i am going to be sick. i hope this can be fixed but i have been fighting with the medical world for literal decades about this and it has only gotten worse so i have no expectation of it being corrected. i will likely someday die with this having gotten so bad it physically kills me my triggering a stroke. but that’s not the point for the moment. i feel sick all the time. especially after i eat or drink. drink in particular. water is my arch-nemesis. yes, water. the source of all life. you see my problem, i’m sure. necessary but excruciating.

anyway, i drink water and feel overwhelming nauseated. which is predictable, though the degree of pain is hard to quantify before it happens as it’s not always the same.

so i am sitting in bed literally writhing in pain and i am told “you’ll be ok”. i’m not sure why that matters. i am in pain now. i am unable to sit still, rocking back and forth because the pain is so severe i can’t breathe. the sensations are incredible. what difference does how i will feel in an hour or tomorrow or next week make? for others, i am told it is comforting. to me it is irrelevant. it simply doesn’t matter whether i will be ok. i have no doubt i will be. but that’s not comforting in the slightest. it’s like having a broken arm and being told by the doctor i’ll be able to catch a ball next year. ok, doctor, that’s great but i wasn’t curious and it hurts now. i can’t move it now. that matters. next year hasn’t happened yet and the ball is of no relevance to the situation. yet they always say things like that when you break your arm, don’t they?

when this is obviously not comforting, the next line of attack on the problem is usually “you’ve drunk water before and it’s never made you sick so it won’t this time”. yes, i know this is an attempt at rationalization and logic as a way out. “you’ll be ok” is a belief. it’s a hope for the future based on an opinion and it’s probably sensible but it’s an emotional projection. and that’s usually what people need to feel better. “it’s been ok before and this time is no different” is a stronger statement to reinforce it. that there’s not just a belief of things being ok but a guarantee based on past performance and logical progressions.

but this is no more significant for me. dice have no memory, remember. it’s what every gambler is supposed to learn, few do and more forget every time they think about making bets. usually stupid bets. the cards i got today don’t determine what i’ll get tomorrow. the number i rolled last don’t decide the next ones. and life is far more like dice than physics or chemistry. what happened last time i had a glass of water doesn’t determine what happens next time. sadly. it might make it likely or not. but that’s statistics. it doesn’t guarantee. and the only thing that really matters in these cases of logic is a guarantee.

but even a guarantee doesn’t much matter to us presents. because the whole point is that tomorrow is irrelevant. actually, ten minutes from now is irrelevant. what i need is for things to be better now. because better later doesn’t take away the pain, sensations, obsessions, thoughts, dreams, whatever i’m experiencing.

anyway, this isn’t about how to fix a problem. it’s just a description of a huge difference between presents and non-presents and, to a large extent, autistics and non-autistics. i hope it’s been enlightening. or useful. or simply interesting. thanks for reading. you’ve spent your present with me and, as that’s all that matters, i am grateful for your eyes.

sun tzu in ukrainian?

[estimated reading time 3 minutes]

there are three types of battle. you can win. you can walk away. or you can be an idiot. that’s not my viewpoint in particular, though i agree with it. it’s one of the most significant advances in military thought of the past five-thousand years. you’ll find it as one of the basic principles of sun tzu’s art of war. where you won’t find it, however, is in the thought processes of the modern west. and this is sad. because it is leading to the meaningless death of hundreds, thousands, perhaps eventually millions of innocent people. in the second world war, ignoring this basic principle of survival was the main reason so many people died. and now i look at the news every day and see blatant stupidity reigning again. i never thought of the ukrainian people as being particularly unintelligent. and i’m sure they’re not. so why has ukraine turned into a country of blithering idiocy in the face of russian invasion? and why has the western world lost its senses and decided to support them in their foolishness?

in a word, heroism. they say the world needs more heroes. but the world doesn’t need any such thing. the world needs more saviors. and more cowards. to be a hero in the classical sense, you generally have to have been two things. successful and dead. it’s an odd combination. but the idea is that you have saved a bunch of innocent people around you by sacrificing your life. when they talk about heroes in modern war, though, they mean something completely different. what is being done in the ukraine isn’t heroic in the least.

fighting a battle you can’t win isn’t brave. it’s unintelligent. and if you think a ukrainian popular force of hastily-constructed street gangs and the remnants of a minimal military with light weapons can hold off an all-out assault by one of the most powerful militaries in the world you haven’t just been drinking but chasing the dragon. so president zelenskyy is one of two things. either he’s too stupid to realize he’s already lost the war or he’s unwilling to save his people by surrendering so no more of them have to die. i’m not sure which it is.

but it would be nice if he would simply step aside and do the smart thing. no, invasion isn’t right. the consummate murder of ukrainians is a war crime and russia, specifically its leadership, should be punished for it. but there is no need for more civilians to die. if a bully walks up to you, pulls out a knife and demands your purse, you give it to them then report it to the police. unless you’re a blithering moron, you don’t fight back. you just let it happen and deal with the consequences later. because your life isn’t worth losing for it.

dear people of the ukraine, walk away from the fight. it’s better to live under russian occupation than let your children die. because russia isn’t going to back down. the result will be the same with one exception — more dead innocent ukrainian civilians. you’re fighting for no purpose except to kill more of your people. your leadership is wrong. peace is good. war is bad for everyone. and you can’t possibly win.

someone needs to translate sun tzu into ukrainian. then personally deliver it to the mock-heroic leadership committing its civilians to unnecessary death. i cry for the people dying for nothing being applauded by the world for “bravery”, just another word for mindless self-sacrifice with no impact on the outcome.

it makes me sad. i suspect it makes you sad, too. dead children. dead children for nothing. think about that for a minute. thank you.

ukraine needs yoda

[estimated reading time 6 minutes]

do or do not. there is no try.

it’s the most famous line from star wars with the potential exception of “luke, i am your father”. but what does it mean and what does that have to do with the current situation in ukraine, russian aggression and desire for empire overflowing into a population being decimated by modern weapons and crusader mentality?

everything.

let’s review the situation. vladimir putin wants to be a combination of a medieval tsar and joseph stalin. and with the nuclear arsenal still floating around in russia from when it was the soviet union, a time when it really did matter in international relations in real rather than just military situations, he’s in a position to make that happen if he’s not stopped. so a few years ago russia annexed crimea. yes, it was historically russian territory. or at least historically soviet territory, much like ukraine. and by that metric so is a good portion of northern asia and eastern europe. including some of what is now germany, practically-speaking.

nobody cared enough to fight back in any meaningful way so he got that territory realistically for free. he’s done the same thing now with ukraine, pretending to be the savior of ukranian separatists and using their desire to break from the rest of the country as a reason to invade and practically annex ukraine as a russian province (or protectorate, as if there’s a difference). and he’s encountering a small amount of military resistance and it’s being exaggerated in the west and ignored within russia but the result is the same. it’s a meaningless resistance and the country will soon be in russian hands. shakily but completely.

maybe.

why maybe? because someone might actually stop him. but somehow i find that suggestion rather hopeless. let’s take a look at who could actually have a real impact on the russian invasion. the united states and china. i mean, this isn’t a military secret. this is common knowledge. there are three huge militaries in the modern world – china, the united states and russia. russia’s has really fallen apart in a lot of ways but its nuclear arsenal and sheer volume makes it significant. yes, south korea has a significant military for its size but it’s unlikely they’re going to be facing off against the new russian empire any time soon unless they have no choice. so that leaves the world’s policing in the hands of the two superpowers. so do they have any intentions of intervening.

first, let’s look at china because that’s the fairly simple answer. does china want to get involved in a fight that has little to do with them? likely no. if they jump in and start fighting russia on behalf of the ukranians, it will be a huge shift in foreign policy. why would they do that? realistically, the only justification for it would be to absorb russia as an extended northern population area for chinese population. and would the rest of the world actually accept that? while i think that is exactly what should happen for many reasons (that i’ve written about quite extensively before), i suspect it would be even more unpopular than what russia is currently doing in ukraine and china doesn’t want any more unjustified hatred from the rest of the world. it has plenty already. not to mention there’s no love for china in ukraine and they would be painfully ungrateful in the same way the rest of the west has treated china. it is a country that has pretty-much created the modern trade economy and supported the development of the technological revolution for a decade and if you look chinese and walk down a street anywhere in the west you’re likely to get your head beaten in. endemic racism is bad. and it’s everywhere. but it’s especially in the west because there it’s not just a viewpoint but a viewpoint attached to a fist. so china’s probably out of this one unless things start to get atomic.

which leaves the united states. and this is where yoda comes in.

western countries have been talking a lot about sanctions against russia. and monetary decisions like the temporary removal of russia from the swift network. what is the real impact of those things on russia? actually, unlike what some people are saying, the impact of sanctions is very minimal on the russian economy. what it does have a huge impact on is the russian people. what the west has managed to do with these sanctions and to some degree with the banking decisions is to create a huge amount of suffering for average russisan citizens and increase support in russia for the war by making the west look aggressive and willing to hurt civilians. which is what’s happening. if you have literally billions of dollars (or hundreds of billions as the case may actually be), how much does it really matter if you lose some of it? half of it? most of it? well, as long as you have enough to keep fighting, you may now be in a position where you have absolutely nothing to lose. and that’s a very scary place to put someone with control of nuclear weapons and a general willingness to attack other countries.

nato has said, to summarize, that it will fight against russia if it invades a nato member. which is code for “we don’t care if you’re not white and western but if you are we’ll jump in”.

what’s happening here is that russia is playing the role of the playground bully. and why do bullies generally not get away with what they want to do in the playground if it’s in front of a school? because the teacher comes in and breaks up the fight, usually by physically forcing the bully to back down. if it’s on the street in the middle of the night, a bully almost always wins. and the only time they don’t is when the victim is physically stronger or manages to run away. ukraine doesn’t have the force to fight russia. they know it, you know it and everyone else, including russia, knows it. i don’t think anyone is entertaining the delusion that ukraine can win this fight alone.

in this analogy, then, who is the teacher? like i said, either china or the united states.

so instead of talking about sanctions and banking, they need to make a clear decision on something, which i think has been made long ago but never really admitted to. sanctions can bankrupt a national economy. in time. but ukraine doesn’t have time. and russia has a lot of economic momentum so it is a question of years rather than days, which is likely all the ukraine has left, perhaps weeks, before a complete fall and full russian occupation begins. either the united states needs to step up and be the world’s playground supervisor or not. but if they’re not going to they need to stop pretending they care. do or do not.

but talking about it is hypocritical. let me be clear. i think we should as good world citizens stand up for the people of ukraine and stop this war. i believe it is our duty as powerful nations to ensure peace with not just the threat of violence but the application when necessary of it against bullies. but i think if we’re not going to do it we should admit we’re leaving these people on their own and tell them they have no choice but to give up. if they can’t win, why die? go home, become part of russia. because that’s the end result that’s coming. it makes me very sad. i’m a pacifist. a conscious objector. i’m anti-war in every possible way. i believe very strongly all militaries should be eliminated and we should live without borders or national leaders. but at the moment we have nations. we have leaders. and we have militaries. but i really have to ask one question. if the united states is going to justify having a military, isn’t this exactly the reason it exists – to save others from the aggression and violence of other nations?

by the way, this has nothing to do with whether ukraine should be part of russia. i don’t care either way, honestly. my only concern is that at the moment innocent ukranians are suffering and dying. little children on the streets shivering in the cold and perishing from exposure to the elements. that has to stop. and i don’t care who controls the country. i suspect those children don’t, either. if you think freedom is worth fighting for, you go and die for it. i won’t. but if you ask a child they’ll tell you something very simple. they want a safe place to live and they don’t much care who’s in charge. so let’s just… stop fighting and keep the children alive?

so please stand up and protect or sit down and shut up. thank you.

surprise

[estimated reading time 10 minutes]

there is a well-known case study from the 80s telling the story of an autistic child. its details are vague and it has been told in at least six different forms. the original report was actually redacted and it’s not even clear what actually happened but it is a similar enough thing to what many adult autistics experience in their daily lives that it is a useful starting point. the child who, in most versions, is named lucia, giving this trigger-response pair the often-repeated name “the lucia effect”, was about seven and was diagnosed several years earlier with severe autism. she was partially-verbal but socially disconnected and exhibited typical childhood autistic traits. she was, however, integrated in a regular school but with a classroom helper. this particular day, she went to school as expected, after cleaning her room, which she did every morning, disposing of everything in her pale blue garbage can and leaving her mother a note of sorts that said “cleaned my room”, which her mother appreciated. knowing lucia was autistic, her parents had painted her room in muted blue tones and pale pink trim to avoid overstimulation and lucia seemed to feel happy and safe there, especially compared to the bright colors typical in primary classrooms.

returning from school that afternoon, lucia went up to her bedroom to change out of her school clothes into soft, light pajamas that would put less pressure on her sensitive skin and, walking through the door, immediately began screaming in panic. her father immediately jumped up from his chair but her mother told him to sit back down, that she had made a change in lucia’s room and that this was just autistic resistance to change, that it would pass in a matter of minutes. lucia had walked into her room to be confronted by a new garbage can, pale pink to match the trim in her room. why her mother had changed it is unclear from any of the story’s many versions but that is irrelevant. she was probably trying to be nice, as far as i can tell. perhaps a reward for all the daily cleaning lucia had been doing and she definitely loved pink. that is likely what her mother thought, that a “treat” or “reward” was justified and desired. the screaming continued for five or six minutes then everything was mostly quiet, punctuated by occasional sobs that dissipated over the next few minutes. her parents returned to what they were doing before. when her mother went up to bring her a snack twenty minutes later, she opened the door and immediately dropped the tray of food, running to the end of lucia’s bed where she was hanging unconscious from one end of her school tie, something her mother always thought was somewhat strange to make young children wear. she had managed to loop it over the top shelf support of her bookcase while standing on her bed, put her head through a loop, thankfully not an actual noose, and step off the bed without screaming out. while lucia was unconscious, she was still alive and her mother lifted her onto the bed where her breathing became stronger. she called a neighbor who happened to be a retired pediatrician and said they would come right over. lucia opened her eyes a few times to see her mother crying and just repeating the same word over and over – “why?”. eventually she answered with three words. “surprises scare me.”

the “lucia effect” is well-documented in autistic studies but almost never discussed without it becoming confused with an only-vaguely-related issue that appears to have dominated all information provided about adult autism – resistance to change.

of course, it’s important to remember that all autistics are resistant to change. actually, all humans are. we are creatures of habit. mammals, especially the great apes, are behaviorally-programmed to function based on a set of expectations and habits and it is this ability to function within an expected framework that doesn’t change significantly that has led to the development of ape cultural structure and, eventually, human language and society, urbanization and the complexity of modern human interaction. in psychology, this is called the “cultural expectation matrix” but it simply means people predict how others will respond and it allows for short-form communication and “normalcy” in interpersonal relationships that avoids the necessity of explaining things over and over. in other words, it allows cultural norms to exist. but that is only part of the story of change-resistance in autism and change-resistance is only tangentially related to the lucia effect.

for non-autistics, change is a spectrum. this is ironic because autism is often talked about a spectrum, which it isn’t. it’s actually a series of disparate binary conditions mostly linked to sensory malfunction and inherent behavioral programming errors. autism is actually a collection of “yes/no” questions about behavior. “is skin sensitivity normal?”, “is this person over/understimulated?”, “is temperature homeostasis functioning properly?”, etc. it isn’t a spectrum where some are more severe than others. it’s a series of potential traits where having enough of them generally classifies you as autistic and some have a particular group while others have a different set. the sets usually overlap considerably but there is significant variation. that aside, change-resistance, like sensory perception problems, is one of the most common traits in autistics because it works differently in autistics than non-autistics.

how a non-autistic person treats change is actually quite complex. they encounter a change and typically ask three questions – these are asked subconsciously but if they were asked directly the answers would likely be much the same. “how unexpected was the change?”, “how large is the change?”, “how important is the change?” – usually in this order. we can call these “surprise”, “severity” and “impact”. the surprise factor is actually minimal even if it is large. for example, seeing a pink garbage can instead of a blue one that was there only hours before is a significant surprise but that surprise fades quickly. severity, however, is much more important. that’s a measure of how different something is. for example, having to change from living in one city to another or to shift from one job to something completely different. these are changes with high severity. impact is the long-term aspect of the change. is the new job only for six weeks or is it a permanent shift? is the move to the new city temporary? has your family come with you or are you now alone? in other words, how much impact does this have on your daily life and for how long? severity and impact play huge roles in how non-autistics deal with change and resist it. for some, severity is the larger trigger while for most impact is the one that causes the most problems. it depends on how much the person is concerned with living in the moment compared to looking at the future. this, however, is not at all how change is seen through autistic eyes.

let’s think about it in terms of a scale. moving to a new city alone may for a non-autistic have a severity level of 9/10 while moving with family may be seen as 6/10. if this is a permanent move, it could have an impact level of 9/10 while a three-week assignment may be closer to 4/10. for an autistic, however, these numbers are mostly irrelevant. autistics think in binary terms. was there a change? yes. how extreme is the change? 1/1. how severe, therefore? 10/10. how much impact? 10/10. it’s all or nothing. either there was a change or there was not. what the change was is irrelevant. new socks or a new job or a new country, it’s really all much the same. that’s a bit simplistic and there are other factors to consider in terms of how difficult life is after the change. but the emotional impact of all changes is approximately equal. the problem is often that one change leads to another. but that is a whole other question.

that’s not the story of the lucie effect, though. lucie didn’t try to kill herself because the change was severe or high in impact. she hung herself from her bookcase because she was shocked. it wasn’t resistance to change. it was panicked mania resulting from surprise. and that’s what’s not talked about in autistic research literature. it’s not that it’s not talked about enough. it’s that it’s not talked about at all. it’s as if change-resistance encompasses surprise and failed expectations when they are completely separate issues.

autistics mentally rehearse their lives. when something is going to be difficult like going to a class in school or eating a meal, they prepare, often tens or hundreds of times, visualizing and practicing being calm, breathing, etc. this can take minutes or, in many cases, hours of rehearsal but the result is often that non-autistics are surprised by how “normal” they are. it’s not about desensitization. it’s really just an application of “practice-makes-perfect” acted out within the mind. the more difficult something is, the more potentially-traumatic, the more frightening, the more time it takes to mentally prepare for it. in my case, the event that causes me vastly more fear than any other is dealing with meals. so i rehearse them endlessly, all day, all night, so they don’t trigger mania and panic when they happen outside my head. which events are problematic varies wildly and tends not to be common between autistics but the reactions are similar regardless.

what this means, though, is that, like watching reruns, you have a specific expectation for how something will go. if you turn on the television and start watching a hockey game you already saw the score and play-by-play for, you know what will happen. if you know your home-team won, you won’t be surprised when they start scoring goals and, at the end of the final period, when they start jumping around screaming excitedly because they won. if, however, they suddenly get beaten, you will be shocked. even more shocked if you actually watched the game live the night before and are now seeing it a second time. you had an expectation and it didn’t come true but you are confused why it didn’t.

this is what mental preparation is like for autistics. it isn’t just a rehearsal. it’s like programming a collection of reruns so the actual event is less traumatizing. the problem is that non-autistics tend to welcome “surprise” or unexpected small changes in their lives. and they see the size of the change or circumstances, motivations and causes of the changes as mitigating or relevant factors. adding “treats” or “rewards”, for example is meant as a positive thing but, when unexpected, is extremely traumatic and shocking for autistics because it changes the preprogrammed event from what was the first time – and often the last hundred or thousand times. if you want to experience what this is like, though quite difficult to simulate, imagine this situation. you take a walk in front of your house, down your street, every morning. you never vary the route. just to the end of the block and back to stretch your legs. the sidewalk is the same. it’s always empty early in the morning. you live in a nice, clean neighborhood with little crime. it is completely calm. this morning, you do the same thing. as you get to the end of the block, an earthquake suddenly begins to shake the ground and the sidewalk cracks under your feet. you drop into a hole and are holding the edges trying to pull yourself out as the world shakes around you and splinters of glass from the windows of the houses rain down on your head. you may be thinking two things – “what is happening?” and, quite possibly, “this isn’t how i expected this to go”. of course, you probably wouldn’t ask those questions consciously but your subconscious would be reacting with shock to the sudden change. that is the result of surprise in autism.

remember, of course, that the quantity of change and its longterm impact are irrelevant to the equation because autistic thought is binary. in much the same way, the level of change doesn’t impact the quantity of panic, mania and shock resulting from the surprise.

there are mitigating factors, of course. but these are often as forgotten as they are basic. the reason for the reaction isn’t that there is a change. yes, autistics are resistant to change for all the reasons we’ve already seen. but that’s not the issue here. the reason is that the change was unexpected, unprepared. it was a surprise. and the difference between knowing something is coming and not knowing is actually an interesting duality in autism. if a non-autistic walked out the door knowing there was going to be an earthquake, they would likely be far more panicked when it actually came than an autistic. once the event is expected, the autistic would have rehearsed it, expected it, practiced it emotionally and be likely to respond calmly as if they had experienced it a thousand times before without emotional reactions. because they have. this is why many autistics function far better than their non-autistic counterparts in fields like emergency medicine or as first-responders in fire or police services. others, of course, don’t work well in those situations for other reasons, some having to do with autism while others simply relate to personality type. i, for example, don’t do well in high-emotion environments because i am a hyper-empath. some autistics are hypo-empaths and the emotions of others are irrelevant so they make excellent trauma surgeons and firefighters.

while change-resistance is a significant factor in autism, it is distinctly secondary to the traumatic reaction to lack of expectation-fulfillment or, in simple terms, the shock of surprise resulting in panicked mania. while expectations may occasionally have to be shifted in a shocking, surprising way, this is rarely necessary. preparing in advance, even if only by a few hours, eliminates the shock and allows autistics to deal with the emotional preparation necessary for the event.

of course, there are many variations to how autistics respond to situations and some are even on the other side of this segmented-binary-division. most things in autism are bidirectional binaries. there’s the question of “is your smell sensitivity in the normal range?” and this is very much a yes/no question. but this may be hypersensitivity or hyposensitivity. in much the same way, some autistics are emotionally or mentally hypersensitive or spend their entire lives craving more sensation, more input. almost all things in autism work this way — the question of normalized range is yes/no but the direction tends to be extreme but in either direction. as such, some autistics crave constant shock and surprise while others, like me, seek predictability. this isn’t change-resistance. it’s shock-aversion. and it is perhaps the one thing about autism i wish more than any other people in the general public understood about the condition, more even than that it is a physical disorder or that it is not a spectrum but a collection of binary traits.

now, though, you know about the division between change-resistance and shock-aversion in autism. perhaps your understanding is better, if not of others, of yourself. how do you relate to surprise? can you watch a movie without knowing the ending in advance? i can’t. watch a sporting event without wishing you knew the final score and the play-by-play? i would much rather have read about it in advance. if i know what’s coming, i can prepare. if i don’t know what’s coming, it can lead to anything, even complete emotional collapse. surprise is terrifying to many autistics. terrifying in the sense of torture. even the smallest surprise – you can imagine birthdays and christmases, for example, are not quite the relaxing events many non-autistics believe they are. people assume it’s about a change in routine and that’s certainly part of it. but it’s the unknown that is the bigger driving factor. and if autistics seem normal when unwrapping presents it’s because they’ve likely fought this battle on the inside to seem socially-adjusted. they might not be quite on the edge of screaming in panic. but it might be good to remember just how close that line may be when surprise is in the air, especially if there are other things making the situation more tense to begin with. as i said, now you know. knowing doesn’t fix anything, of course. but, as with all things, knowing is better than being shocked later, isn’t it?

for me, it certainly is. a little knowledge is a good thing. and a lot of knowledge? even better.

that’s so last millennium, english!

[estimated reading time 12 minutes]

there are many things about the english language that truly need to be upgraded for it to be efficient and streamlined, easy to learn and functional without a huge delay for non-native speakers. most of these upgrades would make it far easier for children to learn to use the language effectively and upgrade the quality of communication in daily life in english-speaking areas, too. but there is a huge amount of resistance to those changes because people are both too stupid and too traditional to embrace them.

that being said, most of them will eventually come simply as part of the linguistic-evolution process. for example, english gradually shed its cases (inherited from german) and gender (inherited from both its french and german roots) and now functions as a caseless, genderless language — thankfully. these are excellent changes that, i have no doubt, were resisted at the time just as much as the changes i propose are resisted now. they will mostly come, though, in the decades and centuries that follow. if, that is, english survives at all. i suspect it will but there is always the chance it will be overtaken in a hundred years by a more-modernized and better-adapted language that’s already spoken by a huge number of people — the one that immediately comes to mind, of course, is likely the one you’re thinking of — mandarin chinese.

to improve the situation for english at the moment, though, is actually far simpler than my opponents would have you believe. and it doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing wholesale change to the language. many of the upgrades i suggest could be done independently of each other. yes, an integrated overhaul would be easier but at what point has the easier path ever been selected by any western society in language or otherwise? if the sensible approach was taken, we wouldn’t have had world wars and the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 would have lasted two months. but a century of warfare and years of viral idiocy have resulted from people’s pigheaded refusal to take the peaceful, obvious solution because they didn’t feel like it and western society is all about giving people a choice, especially if they are incapable of handling it.

looking at the history of the world is actually exactly the right place to start, though, as distant as it may appear from the idea of linguistic modernization. the largest fundamental problem with english is its tense structure. english has three primary tenses — past, present and future. you would, if you are a native speaker of any western, european-derived language, be quickly forgiven if you think “no, that’s not a linguistic thing but the way the world works — things happen in the past, present and future, don’t they?” — the simple answer is no. there is no sharp dividing line between these three times. yes, whether something happened yesterday or will happen this afternoon is extremely important. but in many cases that’s no more important than the difference between yesterday and last week or today, tomorrow and next year. why is the hard-and-fast division so entrenched in language that people make a clear delineation between only three of these blocks of time but ignore the just-as-important difference between other timescales and periods? it is a result of our language.

there are languages that don’t work this way. a few examples come to mind rather quickly. japanese has no future tense. things are either in the past or the present. japanese and korean both treat tense as a marker rather than a continuous state. so, instead of a sentence being in the past and using the past for all its verbs, the verb discussing the whole action is put in the past but the rest remain in the standard form (which is often called “present” but should be thought of more in terms of “default” because it’s used for all time periods when combined with a single verb whose tense has been shifted). chinese drops tense completely and uses keyword markers and maya (and various other mesoamerican languages but the specifics vary and maya is probably the best example) uses aspect instead of tense.

what’s the difference between aspect and tense? in an aspect-based language, you have “before”, “during” and “after” for each action and they are set up as containers to put other actions in. each action has all three and everything else is dropped in place relatively. in a tense-based language like english, “past” doesn’t mean before or after another action in the sentence. it’s given only in relation to the present. there are advantages and disadvantages to both systems but it’s important to remember that language shapes the way we encounter the world. a native speaker of english, french, german or russian, all fundamentally-tense-based languages, approaches the world with a sharp division between past, present and future and talks and thinks about things in those terms. a maya native speaker, however, thinks of and discusses things in terms of when they happen relative to other actions and the worldview that results is strikingly different — and difficult to translate without changing the reference points quite significantly.

what is important to note about these differences is that they’re not just linguistic but cultural. the whole culture in maya civilizations was structured based on a system of relative times. chinese culture is timeless as a result of its language dealing with time in a tenseless manner. it is a simple matter of taking something that happened in the past and talking about it in the future — the action itself doesn’t change at all. japanese society sees this moment and the future as being a continuum with no break and this has had obvious results in tradition and the way the future itself is understood. it is a culture where procrastination is generally not experienced, for example — why do things tomorrow? tomorrow is just an extension of today. so is next year. and next century. the future is actually part of this moment and that means there is no escaping what has to be done by shifting it to another box. i’m sure you can see the changes that can occur when you get away from divisions between times and these range from very subtle things — thinking of events in your life as “before” and “after” certain other events rather than “all in the past” — to extremely concrete, daily-life-changing things — it is very hard, for example, to forget that history is cyclic and a warning for the future when the past is not separate and the future is now so learning lessons from wars and politics of the past becomes a much more tangible reality, where when taught in english it is easy to be detached from both what happened and what it teaches us will happen. if you want a practical way this has impacted modern society, take a look at the response difference between the united states and china to the novel coronavirus. in america, lessons from the spanish flu pandemic are relegated to ancient history and concerns about the future are ideas for another day — “just keep swimming”, as disney’s maxim says. what this president does is short-term and a mess can easily be left for another leader, another generation or just another day. the chinese response learned its lesson from the past and took immediate action, resulting in dramatically fewer lives being lost, people becoming sick and the economy being systemically changed because of shifting general behavior patterns. it’s difficult in many cases to say whether a modernized version of a language and its results for society are “better” or “worse” than its precedent. in this case, it is very clear the chinese way, both linguistically and practically, is better.

so there are two questions that need to be answered now that we’ve talked about why modernization of the tense structure in english needs to be upgraded — what does that upgrade look like and how can it be achieved?

upgrading english to turn it into a tenseless language requires a complete rethinking of one specific aspect of english grammar — its verbs. it doesn’t, however, necessitate shifting any other component. english has a very complex verb structure with some verb forms being single words, others being multiple words, either with helper-verbs or prepositions functioning either as prepositions or adverbs — “i walk to the store”, “i have walked to the store”, “i walked out on my family”. cleaning this up is a fundamental change in the way english works in two ways — first, the elimination of complex tense simplifies the structure considerably and is a fairly simple thing to achieve. second, the elimination of the joined-prepositional forms of english verbs requires a replacement of those verbs with single-word versions. this is actually not that difficult to do but it definitely looks strange if you are used to seeing these as complex, multiword composites as they are generally seen in english – in german and russian, for example, these are already treated, in many cases, as joined single-word entities and this process sees an even-more-extreme treatment in finnish where conjoined prepositional words are non-segmented.

the practical side of this isn’t that difficult but it will take some serious getting-used-to for experienced english speakers. it looks like this. take the primary verb in the sentence or phrase and put it in the dictionary form (in english, the dictionary form is often the same as the first-person present but that’s not always the case — for example, “i be” doesn’t exist but “i am” is used while “i walk”, “i run”, “i go”, “i talk” and “i see” are perfectly standard). the elimination of tense has an interesting side-effect that corrects english’ other most problematic issue, actually, which i haven’t yet talked about here — agreement between subject and verb. this is where there is a difference between “i am”, “you are” and “it is” (none of which, by the way, you have already noticed uses the dictionary form “be” or even anything recognizably-close to it). yes, it would be possible to simply shift to using the agreement-focused present form of the verb instead of the dictionary form but if the language is going to modernize in one way and people have to get used to the shift they might as well only have to do that shift once, as the result of splitting it in two steps doesn’t change the result in the slightest, replacing all verbs (eventually) with their dictionary-forms.

the other piece i’ve already mentioned is what needs to be done with what linguists often refer to as “phrasal verbs”, which is misleading but frequent enough to have gained a recognizability in the english-learning community as a thing — these are actually two completely different groups of verbs that work in unrelated ways, one that forces verbs to function with prepositions as prepositions and another that uses prepositions functioning as adverbs to answer questions like “where”, “when”, “why” or “how” as default placeholders for missing information. more on that in another article, i suspect, though no point in beating that horse beyond its styx-crossing life at the moment as it’s irrelevant. the point is that many of these would have to become single verbs but that’s far less a problem than it may appear. for example, there is a huge distinction between “i pick” and “i pick up”. “i pick a book” means “i select something to read” but “i pick up a book” means “i take a book from the floor and carry it in my hand” — these are, of course, not the only specific meanings of these two phrases but i’m certain you can see the difference from these examples.

the answer to how to deal with these meaning differences is very simple and it should have already occurred to you. if, however, you are an english-native-speaker, i suspect it hasn’t because the simple way of dealing with word-separation in english is never the solution that’s been selected as the first choice in language history. “end of week” became “week’s end” then “week-end” then, eventually, what it should have been in the first place, “weekend”. why the roundabout approach to word-combining? an english idiosyncrasy that must be assumed to exist through its complete history and there are literally thousands of examples of this having happened and being in the process of happening even today.

shifting from “i pick up the book” to “i pickup the book” is a fundamentally simple shift and should pose no problem of comprehension to any english native-speaker or learner and this is the obvious solution to what to do with these segregated, conjoined verbs in a system of single-word dictionary-form verbs. it eliminates the issue of difference between “i pick up the book” and “i pick the book up”, which is a dialectic issue and far beyond the scope of today’s discussion but it’s another serious problem with english that should be corrected if it is truly the universal language of communication it pretends to be.

a continuation of this progression is actually a simple and realistic way to improve the way the language works. english doesn’t need word spacing at all but removing it is a whole other difficulty. the space between the dictionary-form verb and any accompanying preposition, however, is easily dismissed as irrelevant and in some cases has already happened — “i set up my computer” has now become “i setup my computer”, for example, much like in the noun form this is far more common with “i look up the answer” becoming “i do a lookup on the internet” in its noun-based form. so this changes “i walk to the store” to “i walkto the store”, which doesn’t appear to be confusing to any english speaker. it may look unusual at first glance but it doesn’t reduce comprehension and it solidifies the placement of the preposition as part of the verb rather than floating freely in the sentence, a problem that confuses almost all english learners at some point, whether children or adults.

these problems out of the way, however, the main issue still remains — what to do about tense. actually, this is extremely simple and the fact that it hasn’t been done is a staggering mystery to me because it doesn’t just make the language easier to deal with but requires so little change in the structure itself it’s seemingly insignificant except for the replacement of the verb with a verb that already exists and doesn’t need to be created or adapted in any way. this is perhaps not the simplest upgrade to english (that would be the elimination of articles — “i walk to the store” becoming “i walk to store” and “i read a book” becoming “i read book”, articles having absolutely no meaning and being irrelevant to linguistic comprehension so their elimination being a matter of them simply disappearing. it is, however, relatively easy to achieve.

the obvious question is that, unlike with the elimination of articles given as an example, actual information is lost in the conversion of “i walk to the store”, “i walked to the store” and “i will walk to the store” to “i walkto the store” in all three cases. and this is certainly true. but the answer is just as obvious as the problem and chinese (only one of the languages that does this but certainly the most widely-spoken example) has already solved it. adding a relative time marker doesn’t just remove the problem of information loss but gives the potential and expectation for the sentence to include far more information. the english sentence “i walked to the store” has the obvious question attached to it “when?” but no answer other than “in the past”. the implication in a chinese sentence is that the answer to that question should be there. so not just “i walked to the store in the past” but “i walked to the store this morning” being the standard quantity of information being provided in every sentence. if the ambiguity of the english sentence norm is desired, though, while i have no idea why this needs to continue as it is both aggravating and silly, this can be replicated through the use of a general marker. “i walked to the store” would become “i walkto the store before” and “i will walk to the store” would become “i walkto the store after”. but these could just as easily be “i walkto the store yesterday” and “i walkto the store tomorrow”. the higher level of content specificity is great but optional. markers are functionally temporal adverbs and they can be selected and used interchangeably at different levels of detail without any change in the structure.

what we are seeing here is a simplification without significant difference in the overarching structure of the language, what might be thought of as the holy-grail of linguistic evolution. it means a huge step can be taken to make english easier to learn and more useful without actually making people learn a new way to form their sentences.

the result is a bit more wide-ranging than that. in eliminating the past and future as separate times, the impact on english-speaking culture and its recipient cultures in europe and much of the rest of the world, it is possible that people will become more aware of their history and engaged with their future lives. is that necessary as a result of this linguistic shift? i believe it is, at least gradually. whether it happens, however, remains to be seen and is difficult to predict for many reasons. that being said, making this upgrade to the english language, even without its cultural ramifications, will have such an incredible impact on the level of difficult of learning english that children in english-language areas and language-learners all over the world struggling with english will experience a rapid improvement in their skills eliminating many of what are currently seen as “learning difficulties” or “educational disabilities” in western society by streamlining communication and language-learning while improving comprehensibility in non-native-speaking situations, literal billions happening every day all over the world.

is this upgrade likely to happen in the next five years? absolutely not. will it happen without being enforced? difficult to tell. there will eventually be a shift away from tense in english, i suspect, though whether it will be fifty years from now or five-hundred is difficult to determine. english has evolved as a series of huge leaps and vast troughs of sedentary historic idiocy and conservatism — much like biological evolution, it is nearly impossible to determine when the next major advantage will suddenly outweigh the resistance to its adoption into the general population but, when it occurs, it occurs almost overnight. resistance to language-modernization is as infectious and pernicious as the virus now attacking the world and the result, sadly, is much the same thing — the virus is making cultural and information exchange extremely difficult and social and economic mobility nearly impossible while the english language continues to subjugate minority populations and keeping it more difficult than necessary to master and learn is self-serving for a conservative white-dominated western-exceptionalism-focused population. perhaps it’s time we put our actions where our mouths are in a literal sense and shifted our spoken language so it is streamlined, efficient and as easy as possible to learn, master and use. or perhaps we really are, as western societies, too stupid, racist, conservative, biased and hate-motivated to want to. i’m not sure. thanks for taking the time to explore this issue with me. i know it’s controversial — if it wasn’t, there wouldn’t be much point in talking about it, practically-speaking. your thoughts have honored me.

fundamentals of japanese saws

[estimated reading time 30 minutes]

japanese saws (nokogiri, ) have, for the last few decades, been becoming more and more popular in the west as an alternative to inaccurate, rough push-stroke cutting tools that have been the norm for centuries, requiring thicker steel, more force and causing untold mechanical injury to craftspeople. it is unsurprising that they have been so effective in penetrating the lucrative hobbyist woodworking market in such a short period of time. this saturation of the industry, however, has come at an unpredictable cost — there is vast supply of the tools but, as a result of the shift in japan away from handtool woodworking in production shops, very little english-language instruction on how best to use them. the result has been that woodworkers in the west have embraced the tools but simply put them into daily use, replacing their push-saws with pull-saws and not changing their workholding and processes to take best advantage of the tools. the same has been the case with japanese chisels (nomi, ) but not so much for japanese planes (kanna, ), which have had limited appeal in the west and generally come with far more knowledge of their use. while i am not a japanese-trained master this gives me a significant advantage. those on the ground in traditional workshops are out-of-touch with the situation of western woodworkers and their shop requirements and they are stuck not only in a mindset of holistic tool use in the old-style shop but unwilling to entertain anything else as they reject modernization and westernization. being a teacher embracing both the traditional norms of japanese woodworking practice and the advances of modern design and construction techniques means i can speak of the potential use of japanese tools in a western shop and hopefully provide some answers. as such, what follows is some basic instruction in the differentiation, selection and usage of japanese saws. i have written many articles on what the differences are and which to buy but i will summarize that quickly for anyone new to the topic then dive into the details of their specific use in a western woodworking environment.

background

first, though, let’s define a few terms. when i talk about a traditional japanese workshop, this may be a strange concept — especially if you’re a japanese craftsperson — because there is no such thing as a traditional japanese workshop any more than there is a single traditional western workshop that encompasses all the traditions of america, france, spain, egypt, italy and the holy lands from three thousand years ago to today. japanese woodworking really has spanned the entire history of the island nation and it hasn’t remained either static or single-path. that being said, though, there are a few things that are significantly different that distinguish the general rule of modern western woodworking from the traditional form of the japanese version as it was practiced at the time the borders with the west were opened in the late nineteenth century. these can be summarized mostly in three categories — location, workbenches and workholding.

in terms of location, much (perhaps even the vast majority) of japanese woodworking was not done in a workshop. it was done on-location. what this meant was that the tools, to a large degree, were actually built on-site and remained there. this process seems completely alien to the western woodworker but it was not at all unusual for a japanese master and their apprentices to show up with minimal tools, take over a small space either outside or in the home or business (often the same thing in nineteenth-century japan, by the way) and start from scratch, building the complex tools like marking and measuring items, workbenches, workholding, etc and, when the project was finished, those tools remained there and this cemented the ongoing relationship between the master’s shop and the client’s family, often for generations. the tools were there — this is why, in many cases, examples of japanese tools larger than the ones transported in a small toolbox (chisels, saws) tend to be both extremely basic and unadorned. the only exception to this was generally the line-marking tool (sumitsubo, 墨壺), which could become extremely elaborate but was more ceremonial, especially as it was replaced by western-style pens and later pencils for most craftspeople. there is a whole culture that has grown up around the notion of the master and apprentices visiting the home of a local person and the exchange of respect and work but that is rather outside the discussion of saws. it’s important to keep in mind, though, that as a background the idea of having a “workshop” in the western sense is largely a modern and alien concept to much of japanese craft, woodwork in particular. this is of significance when it comes to how the saws developed over time.

from the workbench perspective, there has been a general notion in the west that all japanese masters used a low workbench on the floor and that’s the history of japanese woodworking. that is not the case. not even a little true. yes, low workbenches were often used and they are extremely common. but they are only one of the many workbench styles used in japan and this depended on the type of work, location, availability of wood and, to a large extent, the duration expected from a workshop. for example, if you are in an area with limited lumber and have to set up shop for three months in a client’s back room, how much time are you going to spend creating your workbench? better to put something together very quickly and work on the ground. but if you’re engaged on a ten-year temple project to create decorative screens, for example, and you have all the time in the world to prepare the best possible setup for yourself as an investment in your future work quality, this might be a good three or four months of your time well-spent to build a solid workbench for you and your apprentices. what western culture has mostly embraced is the “notion of difference”, accentuating what seems strange or “oriental” — sitting on the floor is such a feature of japanese culture, it has been tempting for most people not to look elsewhere for japanese woodworking history, despite it blatantly existing. the important lesson to take from this, however, is not that japanese saws work best on a low bench — this is patently untrue for many reasons. it’s that western workbenches standardized on a rather specific dimensional norm even before the time of andré jacob roubo (of l’art du menuisier fame) to talk about it – approximately two and a half meters by nearly one meter by seven-hundred-ish millimeters in height (2×6’x36” if you’re in america) but japanese workbenches were purpose-built and most masters had various small workbenches. small in this case doesn’t mean low. some were low, others as high or higher than western benches. but there was rarely need unless it was for large-scale construction to have a workbench larger than a square meter or slightly longer so a small shop could hold several rather than the one mammoth bench in western shops. it’s just important to keep in mind that western woodworkers are not trying to replicate the situation of a low-workbench environment to best use japanese saws. this is simply an ahistorical interpretation, dwelling on a single aspect of a much more diverse traditional culture.

the third of these concerns is workholding. yes, many masters learned the ancient tradition of workholding with the body while operating on parts. if you want to see this demonstrated in a good english-language text, you can certainly take a look at japanese woodworking tools by toshio odate and it is an excellent guide to this style of woodworking. the problem with his book (which is, by the way, a brilliant discussion) is that it seems to imply that this is a singular and expected tradition for all woodworking in japan. he doesn’t claim this to be true anywhere in the book and has often spoken against this notion in his public statements but it has been embraced as the entirety of japanese craft in a single volume, given that there has been little else written in the west about other forms of it. and this has led to a rather large degree of simplification and confusion in western woodworking about what japanese forms were truly like in history. what he is describing is definitely one school of thinking and practice and it is probably the oldest. it is not, however, the general rule for modern japanese craftspeople of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries where production was far more important than those first-millennium and early-second-millennium floor-and-body-type traditions were still followed. much as some japanese artists still worked on rice paper on the floor, by that point most were painting at easels standing and most japanese woodworkers had shifted away from those ancient forms of deviceless workholding to something far closer to the western norm of clamps and vises.

it is not common to see a vise on a truly traditional japanese woodworking bench in the simplest tradition but from the eighteenth century on it was far more common to see a collection of wooden clamps (very rarely metal even for their mechanical parts) and some vises in production shops. what this meant was that work could be more easily held and work, as a result, could be completed more quickly without sacrificing accuracy. as most modern woodworkers have discovered, working with an unsecured piece can either be done quickly by ignoring small inaccuracies or slowly to achieve the same level of perfection as a fully-secured piece. in japanese woodworking culture, unlike western culture of the time, working for any goal other than absolute aesthetic perfection was shameful. while western clients accepted functionality, japanese products, much like japanese ceremonies and spiritual rituals, were not meant simply to fulfill a purpose but be art in a real sense. so modern workholding advances were welcomed wholeheartedly in most japanese workshops. this is important as i will discuss the use of saws assuming the use of modern workholding and a modern high bench situation in most cases and this is not a divergence from the historical reality, as some would immediately think. wooden clamps and vises were well-known in production workshops living side-by-side with traditional saws, chisels and planes from the seventeenth century on in japan and they were actually embraced in many high-end shops earlier than their western counterparts, especially those specializing in work for local daimyo, who had extremely high standards of expectation, often vast riches to pay for them but very little patience or acceptance of anything that was not absolutely as expected. while i’m not aware of it ever happening, as the local rulers had absolute authority, they could easily execute someone for gaps in their joinery — and there are stories, many true, of workers being killed in the streets of japanese towns in this period simply for standing in the path of a powerful person who just happened to have a sword and lacked patience. this was not a risk most craftspeople were likely to take so perfect pieces were the order of the day, regardless of their construction time, and anything to speed up this process was welcomed. there was also far more significant interaction between japanese and european/chinese cultures at this point in terms of information. the people weren’t moving around much until the late nineteenth century but art, books and culture were flowing across the border in both directions. japanese woodworking masters were well aware of what was happening in china and europe, though it is unlikely those in europe were particularly aware of the japanese traditions, as it was not encouraged that these things were written about in the way they were in europe at the time. whether japanese craftspeople got their ideas for workholding and bench design from the west (including china in this context) or they grew from native roots is anyone’s guess, though i suspect it’s the former.

types of saw

that all being said, let’s take a look at the types of japanese saws and what they’re used for, now that the context of their use has been established. there are three main types of japanese saws that are commonly-used but, unlike western saws, they’re not separated by their purpose or function but their shape. i won’t get into the technical details of what they’re officially called or the history of the names but we’ll call them by the (fragments of their) names they go by in the west because that’s what you’ll be looking for when you buy one unless you read japanese – in which case you’re probably looking in japanese-language resources for this particular guide, anyway. they are the ryoba, the dozuki and the kataba. i will talk a little about the more niche-focused saws in a bit but we’ll start with these three and all the niche-style saws actually fit in one of these three categories, anyway.

the ryoba is probably the most recognizably-japanese of saws. here’s one… (by the way, the photos of saws i use here are an attempt to represent all the major brands i recommend but they’re mostly just taken from official photography done of them and selected for clarity — just because you see a particular ryoba here doesn’t mean i think it’s the best, just a clear demonstration of what a ryoba is, for example.)

perhaps it’s good to start with what a ryoba is not because there are so many misconceptions about it. it’s not specifically a saw that has teeth for crosscutting and ripping on alternate sides. it’s not specifically a saw with teeth for hardwood and softwood on alternate sides. it’s not nearly that specific. actually, it’s not even necessarily a saw with a trapezoidal blade, though that is definitely the typical shape. a ryoba is a saw with no spine, a thicker (relatively-speaking) plate (resulting from the lack of spine/back) and two cutting edges with different profiles. sometimes this means one better for crosscutting and another better for ripping. but that’s certainly not a given and different saws approach this in different ways.

it may be useful to point out a few things here about tooth configuration. western saws are generally thought of as having a rip-pattern or crosscut-pattern tooth configuration. japanese saws don’t fit that differentiation at all. the way saws are generally classified is a little more complex than that but it’s much easier to think of them in terms of their pitch rather than their shape. a ryoba typically has one side with a fine (not super-fine but fine — this is a differentiation you’ll see a little later) and the other with a medium pitch, though this can vary. the important part about a ryoba is that it has two different pitch sizes (the distance between and, as a consequence, size of the teeth) but a single plate thickness. this means all cuts can be started with the finer pitch to make that easier then, if appropriate, the saw can be flipped to continue with more aggressive teeth without binding, something that would certainly result from beginning a cut with a western dovetail saw and finishing it with a tenon saw, for example.

a typical ryoba is particularly useful for doing joinery — cutting tenons, for example. it doesn’t have the limitations of a saw with a spine in terms of depth so you can cut a long tenon on a board without fear of running into anything. it’s fine enough to do this precise work but coarse enough to do it fairly quickly. but what is very important is that the “typical ryoba” sold in the west is only one example of the ryoba type of saws. any saw with a double-sided spineless plate is a ryoba saw (even if it cuts on the push-stroke) and some are used for rough construction work or even to cut down trees. as most non-joinery work is done by machine in the modern japanese woodworking world, there is little demand for these other types of ryoba but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. thinking of the ryoba as only a delicate joinery tool or a slow saw would be an error. the short, fine ones sold by companies today including suizan, bakuma and gyokucho, however, are neither aggressive nor large so this is an easy trap to fall into. you can think of this type of ryoba as the equivalent of a western carcass, tenon or sash saw but i would certainly avoid thinking of it as in any way equivalent to a large handsaw or panel-saw, despite being able to do that work — it is only going to do it with a lot of effort and patience and is certainly not the best japanese saw for that purpose, despite what some of the advertising and youtube discussions may lead you to believe.

the other type of japanese saw that is extremely common in western woodworking circles is the dozuki. it usually looks like this.

“dozuki” is just the japanese word for what in english is called a “backsaw” or “spined-saw” — a saw with a rigid spine holding the plate to make it possible for that plate to be significantly thinner without losing any of its lateral strength. this is a joinery saw in all its iterations. you won’t see a dozuki with a thick plate. actually, if you see a dozuki with a plate that even approaches what in the west is considered a “thin-plate saw”, that’s surprising. japanese saw plates are generally significantly thinner than their western counterparts as a result of the in-tension nature of the pull movement so this isn’t just a thin saw — it’s an extremely thin saw. there was a master japanese woodworker who spoke of their “invisible-line technique” and what they were getting at was their ability to cut such a thin kerf and follow the grain of the wood so carefully and exactly that the cut itself disappeared into the pattern of the wood when it was assembled as furniture. while that’s not necessarily a realistic possibility to aim for in most cases, a dozuki has a thin enough plate for its kerfs to be confused for grain pattern in some species. unlike the ryoba, however, a dozuki (because of its spine) is limited in cut depth. it is useful for small-scale joinery like dovetail-type joints on standard case-pieces and indoor furniture. the dozuki can be thought of as the equivalent of a western dovetail saw but can be used for most of the work of a carcass, tenon or sash-saw if necessary, depending on the depth of the plate. it trades precision for speed – a ryoba will be a faster saw to cut with while a dozuki will leave a cleaner, thinner kerf. you will see dozukis with their outside edge curved, angled or perpendicular to the spine — this is generally a design feature and has no real impact on the performance of the tool, though a rounded edge is often a sign of a cheaply-made blade.

the third of the common saw types is far less common in western woodworking circles but the reason for this has always been unclear to me as it’s the saw i think is best to begin with if you’re doing all-around woodworking. the kataba is a single-sided saw. this is by far the most common type of saw in the world — kataba is the japanese term for what in the west is called a “panel-saw”. it looks like this.

the important thing to remember first about these, though, is that, while this is a great example of the form, this style of saw has infinite variation. these are also kataba saws, though a different subtype and quite rare now, though extremely common a century ago.

as far as i’m aware, these are not made anymore except by a few custom black smith shops where you can special-order one and negotiate your price in fractions of your country’s national debt. just don’t forget that if you think your kataba is small and therefore all japanese panel saws are thin, tiny saws with delicate teeth, you couldn’t be more mistaken. these saws were made to rip and resaw whole trees while other katabas were much smaller, closer to dimensioning or even joinery saws. they typically have a curved back (sometimes the curve is quite subtle) and a uniform tooth pattern. they can vary wildly in pitch but you can think of them as the other extreme from the dozuki. a dozuki is usually a super-fine pitch while a ryoba fits in the fine and middle pitch groups and the kataba ranges from the middle to the coarse and beyond into the brutal and extreme tooth sizes. the kataba is equivalent to the western panel and handsaws, large framesaws (bucksaws or roubo-style framesaws, for example) and rough carpentry saws like you see in hardware stores. in japanese hardware stores, where you might in the west expect a cheap disposable hard-point saw with a yellow handle, you’ll find a cheap rough-pitch kataba.

having gone through this list, you should now be able to identify any saw as belonging to one of these three types, including all your western saws. try not to forget that direction is a mechanical choice in japanese woodworking and it has a cultural background but these saws still exist on the spectrum saws from other countries and traditions also reside on.

positioning and holding your work

there are several ways to position and hold work for use with a japanese saw but this mostly depends on the cut you’re trying to make and the bench style you’re making the cut on. if you want to use a low bench, you have a choice of using clamps or vises or applying your body to the work. using your body as a holding method is generally seen as arcane and i won’t get into the specifics of how to do it — it is similar to using a notch or palm in western woodworking in that some people do it but it’s mostly a traditional-niche thing. if you have a high-bench, i would suggest not trying any of the body-position-workholding techniques you might see done on floor-style benches in videos as they’re impractical. i am assuming you are using a western-style high bench and the techniques i talk about here will work on these. i will discuss them given you have the common, roubo-style bench typical of american and european workshops with a thick top, sturdy legs and plenty of space. if this doesn’t apply to you, please take these guides as a starting point. if it does, however, this should be relatively-complete.

there are several possible positions for the wood and saw. these are not all of them but they are the most common tasks you need to complete. these are pictured as position diagrams and the saw shape/size is not a factor. this is also not in scale. the saw is pictured much larger than it actually is to show an approximate position and angle clearly without the size of the wood and bench making the picture too large to be visible.

while these are certainly not the only ways of holding a board to work with a japanese saw on a high western-style workbench, they are certainly the most useful and common so they are the three i will deal with. we’ll look at when is best to use each and how it should be approached with the saw. the part this doesn’t cover is what to do if you have to cut on a low workbench. if you are vertically above the wood, it it best to bend over the wood and cut with the saw angled down from your body in a stroke bringing the tip of the saw perpendicular to the floor. as these low benches are uncommon, though, i won’t go into more detail here unless someone has specific questions about it. i assume for all these tasks you are using the saw in your right hand. if you are left-handed, feel free to mirror all these explanations and the same techniques apply in exactly the inverse. all japanese woodworkers traditionally worked right-handed regardless. you won’t see photographs or demonstrations from traditional woodworkers using their left hands as primary. there is nothing wrong with using your left hand. it was just expected apprentices copied their masters exactly so hand-preference was disregarded.

position 1 is the board flat on the bench with the end you are cutting sticking off the tail. you are standing facing the bench with the saw inline with the cut. remember, this is not that the body is centered on the board but that the saw plate is exactly perpendicular to the cut. you are not standing with your body centered on the saw but beside the saw and back from it (we will talk about body position in a few moments). position 2 is the board in exactly the same position but with you standing beside the board. the saw is in the same position but you have shifted your position ninety degrees. not every cut, of course, is inline with or perpendicular to the board but the vast majority are (for dimensioning and joinery) so it is easier to think of these as the two dominant workholding and standing positions. position 3 is far less common and we will talk about when it’s used but the board is clamped upright with one face looking at you and your cutting position is the same as in position 1.

position 1 is used to cut most joinery. dovetails and tenons are done in this way (there are japanese names for these joints and infinite variations on them but most joints are one of these two with potential added complexity). this position is also used to rip boards. position 2 is used for crosscutting and to cut the sides of tenon joinery. it is also useful for cutting miters, though those are rarely used in japanese styles. if you are cutting a miter, it is best to stand at that angle to the wood. position 3 is potentially used for crosscutting or ripping boards but it is generally not a preferred workholding position for use with a japanese saw. the reason is fairly simple — in this position, your depth of cut is limited and the force and accuracy that can be applied to the board is far less stable and direct with the board lacking its horizontal flat surface backing. each tiny movement of the board saps your energy and potentially increases inaccuracy, things that can be completely avoided if the board is firmly placed against the surface of the bench.

as for the actual workholding, traditional japanese workholding is done with clamps rather than vises. this is mostly because it allows more flexibility of placement. with the advent of modern vises, however, which include moving dogs and parallel rows of holes for dogs to act as multiple clamping stops holding a board flat against the surface of the bench, this method is also frequently used. to achieve positions 1 and 2 with clamps, it is a simple matter of putting the board close enough to one side of the bench for the clamp to reach both the bottom of the benchtop and the top of the board with good solid pressure. two clamps are usually sufficient. the type is unimportant as long as the board is secured in all directions. to achieve position 3 it is generally assumed a vise will be used or the board can be clamped against one of the legs of the bench. for positions 1 and 2 using a vise, the board can hang off the end of the bench pinched between a front-vise and a dog or hang off the side of the bench secured between a tail-vise and a dog. either is fine for this work. it is important to remember the board is meant to sit flat on the bench, however. holding the board in the vise with nothing supporting its bottom face is not typical.

saw movement is something that is often overlooked but vastly important to get the most efficient use of a japanese saw. while a western saw’s path of travel is intuitive, a japanese saw’s is a little less until you remember why the saw is shaped in this way. that requires a journey down the road of japanese history rather more distantly than woodworking in the west tends to travel for its inspiration. in the early part of the second millennium of the common era, during the high artistic period in japan, a warrior class emerged that would later be known as the samurai. you can think of this as being somewhere approaching low-aristocracy in the west, though nothing similar really existed in european civilization either then or later. these were warriors in one sense but their code of honor and passivity had reached legendary status long before their skills with weapons. they were the strong arm of peace, you could say. as a history teacher, this is a topic i could write an entire book on but the result was that, over many centuries, the samurai class eventually lost its financial backing when peace was more the norm than war and had to take up skilled crafts. their swords were of little use beyond decorative symbols of wealth that often didn’t exist. but they were the model of perfection in japanese society. there was additionally a general assumption of guilt and fault. western society was built on the idea of self-sufficiency and looking out for yourself, taking responsibility. but japanese society was built on community responsibility and the notion of taking care of others. most japanese tools were the result of these ideas coming together. japanese saws are used on the pull-stroke not just because it’s more efficient (which it is from a mechanical perspective, though this doesn’t make it “better” than western saws, which have a different advantage to compensate) but because the idea of group-responsibility meant if you hurt someone you were responsible even if they weren’t being careful. so you had to be far more. working together in small shops meant controlling a tool pulled to you was far less likely to potentially cause harm to another than pushing with your body’s force against something. the other piece, though, is the sword. while most woodworkers weren’t samurai, almost everyone in japan certainly respected their tradition and it was common for all peasants to have at least some experience with edge weapons. these were not the heavy swords in the west that went with metal armor and slow, cumbersome swings to brutally sever limbs by force. japanese saws were thin, light and wielded by people who were mostly without armor in the traditional sense, sometimes wearing the highly-stylized leather protective gear of the late shogun era but that generally came much later. swords were a question of skill rather than force. they were extremely thin but the significant part here is to think of the movement of the sword. you lift your hand with the sword in it and slice down in a single stroke through your enemy. you hold the sword very lightly right at the end for maximum downward momentum and it is a clean cut from the sword being slightly above your head and angled up with your arm bent and out in front of you to your arm being mostly straight by your side, lower, with the sword pointing almost straight forward. this is the general pattern followed for a japanese saw in its use, too.

with the board in positions 1 or 2, begin with the near end of the saw plate against the end of the top of the board, starting about 1cm from the near end of the plate. swing the handle of the saw down and closer to your body until the saw has reached about 1cm from the far end of the plate then reverse the stroke. use the entire length of the saw in a single motion in both directions. when you are beginning, you can start and stop 2-3cm from the ends if this makes it easier not pull the saw too far but you will quickly learn where both ends of the plate are. in position 3, again start and end in the same places on the plate but start with the saw on the side of the board facing you rather than up. continue to repeat this until the cut is complete. at the beginning of the cut, the saw should be significantly angled up. when the saw is at the end of the cut, it should be close to perpendicular to the board. for the last few strokes, it is often necessary to change these angles slightly but they are the most efficient and effective so they should be maintained as long as possible while still cutting the correct line.

the first two strokes are extremely important. if these are in the correct line, the rest of the cut will follow. if they are not, stop and return to the point where they were correct and cut from there. attempting to twist or skew the saw in the cut will simply damage the saw and the cut will still not be straight. a japanese saw has a thin plate under considerable tension during the cut. any pressure other than inline with the saw will bend the plate and break teeth. you can cut almost any material with a good-quality japanese saw if you apply pressure inline with the plate. the softest wood cut using a stroke that is not inline can destroy a saw in moments. this is a general rule with japanese tools — they are meant to be used in a single direction. with saws, it is particularly important. a chisel will bend over time with poor form. a plane is almost impossible to use any other way. a few degrees of twist or lateral force for a single stroke can break teeth from an expensive tool and must be avoided at all times. in terms of speed, a comfortable speed is best. if you find the work difficult, slow down. if you feel you can move more quickly without exhausting your body, speed up. there should be a rhythm to the work and your breathing should be deep and easy as you saw. if you feel like you are working hard enough to sweat, you are working too quickly. if your saw strokes are not all at the same speed, either slow down or speed up to make them regular. japanese woodworking is an exercise in harmony with the body and the material. jerky movements will lead to inaccurate joinery, exhaustion and physical injury.

the body mechanics are, i believe, somewhat obvious from the position of the saw as we have just discussed it but i think it’s important to be absolutely clear about position and movement as i have seen body positions that are awkward, painful, potentially causing injury and certainly leading to inaccuracy and damaged tools not just from beginners but experienced instructors who advise things like standing behind the saw or holding it with two hands while making a cut.

hold the saw in your right hand (we will talk about hand position in a few moments but just assume you’re holding it like a sword — you’ve certainly seen enough martial arts movies to know how a samurai sword is held, i have no doubt). your arm should be beside your body in a comfortable position, extending in front of you. it shouldn’t be coming across your body or angled away, just straight forward. your elbow, at the beginning of the cut, should be somewhat bent. as you go through the cut, drop and straighten your arm. don’t lock it down straight but extend your elbow as you pull the saw through the cut and the handle closer to your body. the saw is moving forward and back, not side-to-side. any lateral movement is to be avoided in all three items concerned — the saw, your arm and your body. they should be swinging in a single arc inline with the cut. you should be facing the cut, body inline but off-center to the left so your arm and the saw are directly inline with it. do not stand behind the saw. it needs to be free to swing by your side without your arm leaving the plane of the saw and the cut. keep one hand on the saw handle and the other relaxed on the other side of your body. there are some specialized tools that require two hands. these are generally rough-milling saws. if you are cutting joinery or dimensioning boards, one hand is sufficient. if one hand gets tired, you are welcome to switch but, realistically, if your hand and arm are getting tired, you are putting too much force into the saw or working to quickly, possibly both at the same time. slow down and stop putting pressure on the saw.

this brings us to the other point. how much pressure should there be on the saw? this depends on the direction of the pressure. you are pulling the saw closer to your body. that is the direction of all your force and that force should be only just enough to make the saw move in the cut. if it requires more than gentle pulling in the direction of your body, it is not sharp enough and you should replace the plate immediately. there should be absolutely no down-pressure on the saw at any time. i will say that again to make sure it’s clear. pull the saw. do not push it down at all.

when you are holding the saw, it should be extremely gentle. you can keep your whole hand on the saw but i find the last finger and often the second-last on my hand are past the edge. you are really only gripping it between your thumb and first finger or two, the others are just for stability, anyway. there are many ways to describe the amount of grip you should be using. some say it is the same as holding the hand of a baby but i have seen some large-pawed hypermasculine types put more force than i would use for my saws when holding a child’s delicate extremities so my usual guidance is that it is about the amount of force you should use when holding the egg of a small bird without cracking it. if you put enough force into your saw handle to crack, for example, a chicken’s egg, that is many times too much pressure and you are tensing your arm and hand muscles and exhausting your body. this is how a japanese sword is held and the saw was modeled on that idea.

these concepts of saw, body and hand position can be applied to all japanese saws and techniques. they are not specific to the ryoba used in the diagram or one form of joinery or cut. all saws can be held and used in the same manner and this allows you to develop a rhythm and familiarity with the tools and achieve precision.

specific woodworking tasks

some tasks may be useful to describe in detail. to cut a board to length, use position 2 and simply cut through each end in turn. to rip a board, use position 1 and cut a straight line to the end of the rip. it is not necessary to cut to the end of the board. if you are ripping and crosscutting, though, it is best to crosscut first then rip because it reduces the tension inherent in long boards that can bind on the saw.

resawing can be done in one of two ways. i recommend tipping the board on edge and using position 1. if the board is short enough to be sawed vertically, position 3 can be used for this with the board held against a solid, stable surface. this should not be the end of your bench. it can be a leg going all the way to the floor but the small surface area of the end of your bench is not sufficient to stabilize the cut and you will likely end up with shaking that will cause lateral force on the saw and potentially damage it.

to cut dovetails, which are extremely common in japanese joinery, though they go by various names depending on their shape and are often hidden within pieces, begin by cutting the tails using position 1. follow this step by cutting the sides of the tails using position 2 from both sides. you can flip the board and cut from the same side but there is no need. you can just walk around the board and cut to save yourself the trouble of unclamping and reclamping it. chop the waste using a sharp chisel (i won’t get into chisel use here but i’m happy to discuss it if anyone has questions or desires a detailed explanation of this procedure). mark the pins with a pencil or pen (ink is traditional in japanese joinery but has mostly been replaced by pencils in the modern era, not just the last few decades but since about the beginning of the twentieth century). cut the pins using position 1 and use a chisel to remove the waste. you can certainly use a fret-saw between your dozuki and chisel if you prefer that approach. those small frame-saws were not typically used in japanese woodworking shops and have had very low adoption as chisels tend to be both large and sharp and make quick work of joinery cuts with greater accuracy than saws.

to cut a tenon, begin by cutting the correct depth on the faces then the edges using position 2, turning the board. when you cut the faces, they should be pointing left and right when you are facing the board preparing to saw. when you are cutting the edges, these should be facing left and right. you will only need to turn the board once. you have now finished the shoulders. cut the cheeks using position 1. it is common to cut the cheeks on the long edges using only a chisel but sawing is also frequently-seen so either approach is acceptable and traditional, mostly chosen based on the amount to be removed. if it is less than a centimeter, a chisel is likely faster. a larger waste piece will probably reward a saw with more efficiency.

having discussed the joinery in detail, it is important to clarify something about accuracy. while japanese saws are highly-accurate in an abstract sense, they are not chisels. we do not cut on lines or to lines. we cut slightly away from the side of a line in the waste material and use a chisel to complete the cut. guide blocks to keep the saw in exactly the right position are sometimes used but these are generally more common for chisels. as the saw is not expected to leave a precise cut without at least a small amount of paring, its accuracy irrelevant in the most complete sense. there is no shame in japanese woodworking to using a jig, guide or modified tool to complete a task. almost all chisel cuts are made using a guide. if you are attempting to saw more accurately, make yourself guides. they are frequently used to teach apprentices to saw straight and masters use them for long, straight cuts on a regular basis even after decades. japanese woodworking is not about showing the marks of the maker. it is about absolute perfection. if the cut is not perfect, it is shameful. if there is any inaccuracy, it is shameful. shameful craft skills were not accepted and frequently punished with physical injury, loss of family status, monetary cost and, in extreme situations, death. there was never any reason to take this risk. you shouldn’t have one either. make some guide blocks and sawing jigs and consider it part of the traditional approach. if you want to do things freehand, put down the japanese tools and return to western woodworking because freehand doesn’t give the absolute perfection and accuracy japanese tradition and aesthetics require.

of course, that sounds rather heavy-handed and i am certainly not telling you that you shouldn’t use a japanese saw inaccurately. but there is a notion in the west that guides and jigs are non-traditional and that it is always more skillful or enjoyable to do things freehand. in the japanese tradition, there is no “graduation from jigs” or “no longer needing paring blocks”. perfection requires using guides for guaranteed accuracy. in a society where wood is extremely valuable, time is priceless and anything short of aesthetic perfection is seen as a personal insult not just to the client but the entire spiritual world and its inhabitants, there was no room for error. measure twice cut once? not on your life. measure once, build a jig to guarantee accuracy, hold everything so it can’t possibly move then cut decisively. it is considered respectful of the tree to be accurate and ensure perfection. anything else is shameful to its spirit.

other questions

there are a few other questions i have been asked that i will now address here as they don’t really fit in any of the existing sections. if you have specific questions, please feel free to ask. if i haven’t covered it here, it may require a detailed answer, a new article or simply adding a section to this one, all of which i’m happy to do.

the first of these questions is about the common western approach of sawing boards using a triangular cut method. there are reasons why this is effective and wise in the west, though i suggest most of them can be avoided by simply using a sawing guide and saving a lot of time and effort. given the fact that a japanese saw will cut straight when it is pulled, there is no need for flipping the board, rotating anything including your body or cutting triangles. it doesn’t matter whether you can see the other side of the cut. it is straight. if you line the saw up and the first few strokes have produced a cut in the right plane, it will continue that way unless the saw itself is damaged, in which case replace the plate and try again. if you are sawing the wrong line, stop and saw the right line then continue. do not try to twist or redirect the saw. you will simply break the saw and annoy yourself in the process but not fix your cut.

the second question is about sighting. western woodworkers often draw lines on all sides of a cut. japanese saws obviate this need. when dovetails are marked, for example, there is only the need to draw a single line on the top face of the board from the end to the base of the tail you are about to cut then cutting on that line. when you are cutting on a line, you are looking down at the top face of the board so marking other faces, ends and edges is pointless. marking should be done with a pencil or pen in a way that is visible to you without needing to get closer than a meter. if you can’t see a pencil line on the board at a meter, use a pen. if the pen is too difficult to see at that distance, use a marker. don’t get closer or “choke-up” on the saw. this is a beginner error that would never have been let pass unpunished in an apprenticeship situation even the first time. you’re not trying to hit a baseball. take your time. if you can’t see, fix the fact that you can’t see until you can before you saw. inaccuracy comes from rushing. so don’t rush. it’s disrespectful to the tree. remember you are only ever going to see what is on the left side of the blade. don’t bend your body out of shape to look over the saw. if your arm is straight and your saw is good quality, you will cut a straight line. if either is not, it doesn’t matter where your eyes are — at that point, you have already made a mistake before the saw has even touched the wood and you should correct it then, not after you’ve damaged the piece and attracted your own disgust with yourself. that’s not about skill. it’s about preparation and thought. most of this practice is about preparing and thinking rather than doing. using a japanese saw doesn’t require skill. it just requires patience and being slow, methodical and self-aware. you can get every cut perfectly-accurate the first time if you are careful. so be careful and your results will make you happy and proud. try not to be too proud, though. the tree did the hard work and sacrificed its life. you only spent a few minutes compared to its years and death. it deserves most of the credit. when you are looking down at the board, you should see where the saw is and make sure the line is going in the direction you require. the important part, though, is not about cutting close to the line but about making sure you don’t get too close to it. the line marking the end of your cut should be clearly visible and you shouldn’t touch it. you also shouldn’t touch the line marking the cut. keep at least 1-2mm from both your cut-line and your stop-line. that is a place only chisels may go and their spirits will haunt you if you intrude on their domain. seriously, though, you’ll be happier if you stay away and pare every time. it’s an excellent habit and very traditional.

final thoughts

i am honored you have taken the time to explore this topic with me and deeply hope you have found this discussion useful. thank you for your respect. i wish you the best of luck with your endeavors in the land of japanese saws and traditional woodworking. please, of course, let me know if you have any questions about this or any other aspect of the craft. i am more than happy to provide answers on anything if i can or, if i am unaware, consult with those with decades more experience in the tradition to find you an answer, if possible.

ありがとうございます。

2021 furniture challenge, stage 1

[estimated reading time 29 minutes]

this year, as a woodworking teacher, i was given a challenge and gave it in return to students and others in the wider woodworking community. this challenge is simple. it’s a variation on the “draw this in your style” challenge floating around the art world and on instagram but with a design and manufacturing twist. take a historic form of furniture and design a modern piece in any style you like based on it. the restrictions, though, are what make it especially fun. as furniture, it isn’t just art. it’s craft, which means it’s meant to be useful – there’s no point in making a chair you can’t sit in or a table that can’t hold up the dinner plates. it has to be beautiful. but it has to be functional and that means a chair that’s too weak is meaningless and a table that has to be two meters tall to look right is useless because who eats dinner with the plates above their head?

so that’s the starting point. but where to go from there? it was decided it was only fair that, as an experienced instructor, i had to take on a much larger challenge than the students. they would each do a new version of five forms – bed, chair, cabinet-on-stand, tea-box/jewelry-box and stool. and i would (yes, this is a huge amount of work) do five new completely different versions of each of them. so what i’m calling “stage 1” is creating the five versions of one form. i wanted to start with the most challenging one for me, a form i’ve always struggled with because i personally don’t like the objects themselves and they’re so incredibly large and ungainly they leave less scope for decorative details compared to their sheer bulk. and they have no choice but to have fixed-dimension soft components added. i’m talking about beds. and mattresses. unlike seats, where you can make the soft components optional, beds need mattresses and those are fixed dimensions and large. anyway, this is what i have come up with and how the process has gone. i’ll go through each of my new designs and talk about how each was created. i know this may only serve a niche audience but i figure there are plenty of furniture-design students out there who don’t like to ask about the design process because they think they should know or, in many cases, because designers tend to be rather secretive about their processes. i am not. so feel free to ask any questions you like if anything isn’t clear.

pencil-post bed

having accepted the design challenge, i started, of course, like all good designers by looking for inspiration. many people will quote “good artists borrow but great artists steal” when you’re designing. or any other art process, come to think of it. and it’s very true. but there’s a question of how far you can go before you’re not doing anything new anymore. so i had to think seriously about what it means to create something new and what it means to just make a copy. there’s a very thin line between these things. for example, if you go to ikea and buy an eames-inspired chair or a shaker-style dresser, how much design work has actually been done by ikea and how much was done by eames or one of the brothers in the village? hard to tell. not that this is a judgment – a shaker dresser is a beautiful piece in many cases and it doesn’t matter who did the design as long as it is beautiful in your home. but, as this is an exercise in design, i didn’t want to simply nearly-duplicate something that already existed. my first design style, i decided, was going to be an interpretation of my favorite visual style for a bed – the classic pencil-post. i have always liked this form because it is so light yet refined and decorative without needing all the embellishment poster-beds are often known for, especially if you look at photographs from historic castles and manors from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. they tend to have more the aesthetic of a blocky fireplace mantle than the decorative simplicity of a light frame. where to find inspiration, though? i first went to the source, looking at shaker originals and modern copies of them. there is one thing you notice about pencil-post beds in general. they have either tapered or simple round columns as their posts. some are tapered from the middle to the top with a small foot, others from both directions to top and bottom. some have a square post detail in the middle. but i don’t generally like round posts and i’m far more heavily-influenced by the danish modern style where straight, clean lines tend to be used as detail elements rather than ornamentation and turning. so the bed became a series of square posts tapered in four directions. if you look at craftsman-style (arts-and-crafts-style) poster beds, you’ll see a two-face taper where the foot is biased in the direction of the outside edge. shaker-style furniture, though not always the case in poster-beds where thickness is more necessary for strength, are tapered in the other direction quite notably. these tapers in my version aren’t straight lines – they’re subtle curves. this can be accomplished with a simple process of mounting and wedges at the bandsaw but that’s a construction rather than design detail and i’ll focus here on design – i just want to point out that this isn’t a difficult detail to create in the final product, just an interesting embellishment compared to the typical straight tapers on many bedposts, especially columnar ones.

where to be inspired, though, is the real question here, beginning the first design of the first stage. and the answer was surprisingly simple – not furniture but trees. i looked at various photographs of forests and the interlocking canopy of branches and their thinness and simple elegance gave me a push in the right direction. trees don’t do straight lines. they do curves. up the trunk, along the branches. so my design takes the curves of branches and uses them not only for the upper arches where a canopy can be supported but the support rails and headboard/footboard panels. they’re not rising-sun-style half-circles. they’re subtle curves but i think they’d lose a lot of their appeal and look much closer to mass-produced furniture made without attention to detail if they were simply straight. even the support rails on the sides have a curve top and bottom. the only straight-line detail that gets real attention here is the square post but it’s got an organic curved outer profile contrasted against the straight linear version if you look at it directly from top or bottom. this is in many ways a very minimalist and simple bed – not something usually said about a four-post, nearly-ceiling-height piece of furniture. but in this case i believe it’s true. i think it works either with or without an actual canopy structure – as a straight pencil-post bed or a full-on silk-draped luxury in the bedroom. having the structure cross in the center rather than either at split-right-angles or in rows and columns is a way to channel the idea of tree branches in the forest rather than the more human-created style of grids and equal rectangles – neither of which i’m opposed to but in this particular design feel too brute-force and confining for the visual effect.

organic mid-century bed

the next piece i began to work on is a style most of my students and friends will recognize as my typical approach to design – minimalism, offset edges, sweeping curves. if i had to say who are the most influential designers in my life, it would be very difficult to come up with a short list or perhaps five. but it would probably look something like this.

  • george nakashima
  • arne jacobson
  • hans wegner
  • finn juhl
  • kaare klint

they all have several things in common. they use large-scale curves, clean lines, wide, flat surfaces and organic forms. their furniture is all distinct but their similarities are most of why they have been so fundamental to how i design. looking at george nakashima’s chairs, for example, was the starting point for the inspiration for this bed. most of the time, designers treat a bed as something like an enlarged picture-frame sitting on the floor with legs where the art is replaced by the mattress. i have no problem with that approach but i wanted it to be less a picture-frame than a comfortable place not simply to sleep but to rest, work and read. the problem with the picture-frame approach is that the headboard tends to be decorative and usually very uncomfortable. taking the curve from when i design simple chairs and turning that into a place for the back to make the bed a usable piece of furniture during the day is something i’ve always tried to do but it’s not always possible. in this case, though, it certainly is. an organic split headboard is relatively simple to visualize but getting that curve to be dramatic enough to be beautiful but subtle enough not to feel like you’re in a recliner when you lean against it is certainly a balancing-act.

this is a place where i should probably talk about construction details, especially as they’re not necessarily visible here. this bed would be made from mostly solid stock (walnut), of course, for strength. but the headboard is an exception. there are two ways this can be achieved – mixing materials and veneer or simply veneering a segmented panel. i opt for the second in this case because it’s non-structural but the more-involved mixed-material approach would be perfectly fine as a way to build this headboard, too. what i mean by segmented panels is that instead of trying to bend wood to form the headboard or using layers of veneer stacked from face to face, this panel would actually be a series of 19mm plywood cut to the shape of the curve in cross-section then laminated and veneered on all six sides. this gives incredible strength not just through the multiple glue joints but the inherent strength of the plywood – in this construction, it has glue in all three directions against an axis rooted in the frame so you get torsional rigidity without adding weight or density. to shift to the mixed-materials approach, this same process can be replicated but, instead of simply stacking identical plywood curves along the direction of the headboard, metal panels would be cut to the same curve and sandwiched between the plywood curves to add strength. these would be adhered to the two plywood panels on each side in the lamination using countersunk fasteners then the plywood would again be glued in cross-sectional lamination. this provides a stronger panel than the straight-plywood-lamination version and is very useful for the construction of chairs but, in this case, is unnecessary and adds a significant level of complexity as routing a template for that curve in plywood is easy but, in metal, requires significant metalworking tools and more refinement time for no significant benefit in practice. as for the rest of the construction details, the bottom of the bed is supported to avoid those curved feet having to take all the down-pressure of people sleeping on the mattress. they would, in practice, likely hold up quite well but there’s no reason to take that chance and have people break a bed that involves so much intricate shaping and construction when the risk isn’t necessary. the support feet are moved back far enough that anyone standing in a bedroom wouldn’t see them without dropping to the floor and the bed then looks like it is floating on extremely thin curved legs. these are a detail mostly reminiscent of traditional shinto temple design, something that was often incorporated in samurai armor and some of the early buddhist temples in japan. the non-mitered corners of the bed strike me as far less western. i’ve always hated mitered corners so you will likely never see them appear in my work unless what we’re talking about is a mitered-corner box – even then i tend to use other methods than having a visible miter. i’m totally fine with having box sides come together in a miter but i will usually do my best to avoid having that miter seen on top or bottom, even when the box is open. so in such a visible place as the edges of a bed with wide platform sides it would be unthinkable for me to have a 45-degree anywhere when a straight line is far more pleasing and simple to the eye. this gets the construction closer to frame-and-panel than traditional picture-frame. the actual construction is completed with hidden integral-tenons on the flat rails and floating-tenon joinery is used for everything else. the process could be done with floating-tenon joinery in all the components but there seems no reason to avoid integral-tenon joinery where it is possible and the tenons can be far larger as a result, providing extra rigidity in the platform components.

storage bed

one of the things that bothers me about beds in the western sense is their massive size and permanence. japanese beds are traditionally only a padded cushion on the floor. it’s much the same as putting a western mattress on the floor and feels mostly indistinguishable from that with one important difference. it’s not usually possible to fold a mattress. the japanese version, however, is designed to be folded and put away in a closet in the morning to be taken out in the evening when bedtime approaches. this means there’s no need for a dedicated space to sleep or a dedicated room to sleep in. in western homes, the space dedicated to the bed is generally wasted the rest of the day and this has always struck me as odd. the solution to this has been seen as things like the murphy-bed, which i don’t understand – why have a folding bed frame when you can just have a folding mattress and avoid all the complexity? i think a far better option is to take the footprint of the bed and make it functional as something other than a bed at the same time. i’ve always liked storage beds – i had one as a child for most of my teen years and it was incredibly useful in a small bedroom. so, given the challenge of designing beds, it is only natural that i incorporate storage. in this case, i have taken a traditional craftsman-style storage bed and turned it into a more organic, asian-inspired bed without losing the functionality of the under-bed drawers. drawers, unfortunately, tend to be boxes with rectangular edges and that makes them blocky and uninteresting. they can be decorated with carving or color, embellished with complex visible joinery or simply accentuated in a brutalist style. in this case, though, i took a different approach – turning the drawer shapes into intersecting curved shapes closer to leaves than storage boxes. the curves are more exaggerated than my usual soft organic shapes but with such a large form as this i believe it’s necessary to make the curves clear and decisive rather than almost-hidden and easily mistaken for straight lines at first glance. wood selection is very important in these large panels. in this case, the frame is dark-stained cherry and the decorative panels are veneered with highly-figured cherry with continuous grain. the match doesn’t have to be perfect but being visually matched makes the dramatic contrast less visually-jarring. the same effect could be achieved with solid-wood panels but the expense of this for beautiful grain in those sizes is prohibitive and veneer in these cases is a far simple option – it also eliminates the need for incorporating floating panels as the veneer-and-plywood approach negates the potential for seasonal-wood-movement on large elements like headboard panels and inset drawer-fronts.

simple children’s loft-bed (taking a break)

sometimes when completing large-scale design projects, i like to take a break and work on something in the interim. it keeps my ability to focus on highly-elaborate designs from getting distracted and bored, something i have struggled with my whole life. i easily lose motivation when a task is monotonous or loses its challenging aspects. what i often supplement design projects with is actually short design exercises to help the woodworking community with simple projects. there is a flood of simple plans on the market, often free or cheap, to build everything from dressers and beds to chairs and boxes. the problem is that most of these plans are difficult to follow and uninteresting. they’re either so boring nobody wants to actually have the finished project or so complex beginners don’t bother to try them. i have tried for the last few years to provide free plans to students and other woodworkers of easy-to-complete projects for furniture for their homes that are interesting and aesthetically-pleasing enough that, even if they weren’t limited in experience building, they would want the furniture. while i was thinking about beds, i realized there was one thing that i had never seen a freely-available model for that was within the grasp of most beginner woodworkers. the result was putting together and making available this model of a loft-bunk-bed. it’s simple and uses clean, straight lines – squares rather than rectangles. it doesn’t have complex joinery or construction and it’s meant to be mounted against a wall for extra strength, as most bunk-beds tend to be. it incorporates a simple desk but is mostly just a straight-forward bed for two children. i imagine this is what the shakers might have imagined for such a project if they had needed to house two children in a room, though that’s just speculation.

this raises another interesting topic, of course – the cost of woodworking plans. while i, in theory, respect the right of people to make their own decisions and i won’t get into a discussion of my issue with the trade economy and competition, i make all my plans, diagrams, drawings, models and renders available at no charge to the woodworking community as a volunteer service. i love design and building and i will happily charge money to create a new piece for a client. and i am happy to be paid to teach classes. but i see no reason why students and woodworkers out in the world should be restricted from making interesting and beautiful pieces of furniture simply because the only freely-available plans are boring and simplistic – or, in many cases, poorly-thought-out to the point that you see workbenches with complex fastening solutions that will fail in a matter of months and chairs held together with nothing more than screws where failure is only one two-legged-reclining-action away from the first day they’re used. so the result is items like this and many simple projects where i produce step-by-step plans and dimensional drawings to accompany rendered models. i am happy to do that for a community that has supported and nurtured my love of design and building and anyone is welcome to my cad models, too, if that’s useful. it’s nice when people give me credit for my work but i understand that’s not always the case and it’s a risk i am prepared to take if it means more people get out there and build beautiful things.

floating-platform bed

in the spirit of channeling george nakashima, i returned to my japanese-danish-mid-century design roots with the next design and modeled it on a totally different type of chair. this concept is loosely based on a nakashima chair i once saw in a museum exhibition, though i can’t remember what it was called – the chair, not the museum. either way, it’s unimportant but if you look at any genuine nakashima furniture i suspect you’ll see the chair i mean. the inspiration is loose but unmistakable and i tip my hat thoroughly in his direction for this. it doesn’t resemble any of his bedroom furniture designs but credit is certainly due for the inspiration. the story (no, not every piece has to have a story but this one does) is that this is the bed equivalent of a floating slab-top table. the difference is that the tabletop isn’t on the top. it’s under the mattress and the curve scoops up the mattress and gives the impression of movement away from the headboard, which is angled and curved. the curve matches the one on the bottom of the platform and the angular meeting between the headboard and platform provide a human contrast with the organic shapes on the opposing faces. the whole structure appears from a distance to be floating but has solid, square, straight-line feet and an underframe to support the bed firmly from below. the through-tenons on the headboard give it strength without needing the lamination approach on some of the other designs here – the headboard is also fairly light. the contrast is accentuated by the combination of wood species – the majority of the bed being built from walnut but the slats coming from the rich red tones of cherry selected to avoid uniformity but this could easily be a more decorative exotic wood – jarrah would make a great tone in keeping with the red or padauk, potentially. using something very dark like wenge or ebonized oak would give contrast in the other direction and that would work well for this piece, though i think the lighter tone on the headboard sets off the dark exterior more clearly. the blocky, elongated squares tapering to thick rectangles gives the impression of solidity to balance the floating platform and airy, almost insubstantial headboard that is deceptively thick when measured but takes little visual space. the undercarriage of the bed is far more solid than the other designs in this challenge as the bed is not resting on outside feet, taking the slats only for mattress support. the whole frame, which is relatively heavy because of the thick walnut components and floating headboard, must also be supported by the four legs so their strength is distributed through the frame using lapped cross-members the entire length and width of the frame, keeping everything solid.

lofty childhood ideas

having allowed the idea of a loft-bed (or bunks in general) to live in my mind for a little time, i was prepared to come back to address the concept not just to create a beginner project for the community and students but a serious design for a whole-bedroom-in-a-single-piece bed. this is a considerable departure from the previous designs, not least because it’s not a single bed or even a bed in and of itself but two beds – not for adult clients but children. not that the bed is too small for an adult but most adults have moved from single beds to large ones at ground-level (though honestly i have no idea why, come to think of it, as i am completely happy with a single bed – i prefer floor-level, though, to ceiling-height because climbing that ladder for me would be more than difficult). this is the result of an interesting mental exercise. i thought first about the styles i truly love in furniture – danish modern, scandinavian minimalism, japanese minimalism, shaker. then i turned around to look at other twentieth-century styles i have far more a hate relationship with than one of love. bauhaus came immediately to mind – does anyone truly need all that concrete? it’s like taking the overwhelming nature of brecht’s refusal to acknowledge the lessons of the past and applying it to architecture and, mostly by accident, it seems, furniture. but more to the point are the styles i’ve never really understood or appreciated and likely won’t at any point soon – art deco and art nouveau, which are often seen as a continuum but i tend to imagine as two distinctive stylistic aesthetics. so my walk through experimental images in my mind took the form of a single question – if i had been designing at the height of the deco movement, taking its cue from the art nouveau period that just predated it, with all its blatant large-scale curves, thick panels and frames and unsubtle contrast transitions, could i design in that style without breaking my own design sensibilities. the result is this bed (bed-ish, you could say and still be quite accurate as it’s two beds, two desks, four dressers and an awkward number of shelving systems, depending how to decide to count them).

having explored the idea of deco more thoroughly (i am forever grateful for museum collections existing online, though i do wish more of the museums with huge furniture collections would photograph them and share the way they have with their oils and inks), i embarked on the idea of a different question. assuming i am living in the twenties (the nineteen-twenties, not the twenty-twenties, which i believe would have been a much safer place to live in many ways, though whether the great depression was more potentially-dangerous than the current combination of viral pandemic and generalized self-obsessed idiocy i have no idea) and designing furniture, what would a child’s shared bedroom setup look like. could i make something with enough interesting large-scale curvature and bold lines to fit the style but be subtle enough to satisfy my desires for clean and unadorned. the result is the contrast between ebonized frame pieces and figured cherry but meshed with a lack of offsets, flush-mounted inlaid drawers, hidden joinery and shelving on grain-matched runners, eschewing decorative elements for more bold geometrics and color contrast. these desks are large for children and there’s plenty of storage for even the most collection-obsessed – assuming there are closets or wardrobes, of course, for the myriad clothing children seem to have for all potential events in the modern world, though this exploding wardrobe size for someone who is about to outgrow it all any moment (or even someone who isn’t) confuses me more than most things about western consumer culture. that being said, though, this bedroom furniture is hopefully something that could be around for a child’s life, being comfortable and soft enough for young children and simple and modern (an interesting thought for decor of the twenties that can’t really be said of some later decades of the twentieth century) for teens and possibly go on to another generation, though i always hesitate to imagine my furniture designs being passed along as family heirlooms. the whole structure sits above the ground rather than being flush like most stroage-type bed units, making it feel more light, despite its large visual weight. the open design of the desks with shelving above and beside contribute to this, too. it’s all-too-easy to box things in with loft beds and storage units, making the whole thing feel like a built-in in a dark room, especially with wood-grain, something i hope this has avoided with its pass-through, free-standing aesthetic. even the dressers stand well off the ground to eliminate that sense of weight and permanence children often react badly to. my original thought was to have a single curved ladder in the center but, unlike a century ago, safety regulations conspired against that idea and recommendations from governments say straight ladders are the only way to go for commercial furniture, a trend i feel i should copy in this. i make up for it with the aggressive curves on the desks and shelves, both the small shelves above the desks and the much larger ones to hold books and clothing above and beside the dressers. in practice, this unit could be modified to be two beds end-to-end and mirrored by rotating the perpendicular unit ninety degrees and shifting the ladder half its width to the right – i expect if i have an opportunity to build this again that might be the requested form, depending on the dimensions of the room it will live in. even without shifting the ladder, that solution would be functional with minor adaptations. these are not strictly mirror images (see the support beam above the left side of the desk on the short leg that doesn’t appear in the other segment, for example) but they are close enough to make that modification work without much difference in the design phase. i would have said this would be the most interesting of these designs to build and the one i was most looking forward to at the time. but that was about to change with the introduction of color – just wait and you’ll see what i mean. i believe this is the most practical room design i have yet created, though. that may be the greatest irony, starting from the least-functional of styles (self-admittedly and by design, if you read literature of the deco movement) and coming up with an extremely practical and functional piece. i guess that’s what happens when a mid-century minimalist dives into the recent past.

the book’s a foot(board?)

in the interest of all things simple but with subtle details of custom design and organic flavor, the final bed in the challenge was the answer to a different hypothetical question – given true straight lines, blocky squares and inset overlays work in cabinetry and small pieces, can it work effectively at the size of a full bed or is it simply overwhelming in its bulkiness? i believe it works, keeping a few things in mind. i originally thought of this as having drawers and storage at floor level and that simply gives the piece far too much weight from a visual perspective. having small storage at the top creates balance but at the bottom feels more like an overweight posterior outstripping the beauty of a lean upper-body. the open shelving and double braces rather than much thicker large single braces adds visual airiness and allows the piece to float, especially with its fairly-high legs combined with its low-mounted mattress, connected to the bottom of the lower stretchers rather than, as is more typical in split-stretcher bed designs, the middle of the upper one to allow the bottom to be the frame and brace for the structure. the shelves at the end would work as bookshelves or clothes storage depending on need – in my case, it would certainly be books as i have dramatically more of those than clothing, something i am more than happy with on reflection. the wireframe aesthetic conveyed by even these fairly-thick double-rails and single-posts feels modern without being experimental and the whole piece, i hope, looks solid without being blocky, especially with its inset drawers. the curved shape of the headboard makes it comfortable to sit in for hours and work in a way a straight headboard wouldn’t and it is surprisingly small for a full-size bed. a single-bed version of this would be even more minimalist – the single version, by the way, has three columns of drawers, the left being two drawers mirroring the four on the right but with no other significant changes and, though i have mostly showed all of these in their queen-size forms, i can honestly say i prefer this in its single implementation. i have been careful not to show the king-size versions as the example pieces because they start to become all-too-square in their proportions. queen is a good balance and by far the most common size requested from custom furniture makers in canada and america today, anyway, so it’s an honest representation. it could be rather more overwhelming here in image and speed if i shared all the versions of each bed! i have only showed the children’s beds as single and adult-focused ones as queen.

reflections

so that’s five and that was the challenge so i turned my attention to reflecting on the process and what i have gained and experienced through the creation of these designs. but there was at least one more thing i didn’t feel like i had completely fleshed-out and i couldn’t leave that undone. what was missing? i’d done history, curves, contrast, hypothetical trips to the days of speakeasies and functional minimalism. what i hadn’t done was color. of course, i wouldn’t be the first wood-obsessed woodworker to avoid using anything but natural wood color – and, in my defense, i did use ebonized accents and frame components, covering the natural wood. i was thinking deeply about the milk-paint i often use in my design. but that didn’t satisfy. what i needed was (gasp) veneered plastic laminate. and not just as an accent. as a design feature on a large scale. this is something i’ve tackled before but only in small (read decorative casework) pieces, never something that was the primary element in a room like a bed or dining table (stay tuned – more colorful laminate is on its way in another form, i assure you – colors are more contagious than viral coronas). so there are reflections on the process i want to share but first i want to take the whole notion of reflections and share something far more literal.

thinking about the notion of colors and reflections, i found myself looking for inspiration in an unlikely spot, a designer whose work i have always respected but generally not liked very much – frank lloyd wright. what has continued to inspired me, though, from his work isn’t his architecture, which i find painfully childish, or his furniture design, which is all-well-and-good but i don’t like medieval castle furniture and it’s painful to actually sit on those chairs with their awkward proportions and straight backs – the shakers did it so well and he simply ignored their ideas and designed furniture like buildings, pretending humans don’t have curved body parts. but his glass accents intrigue me. they are a bit too abstract for much of what i want to accomplish in a minimalist way – and especially for a young audience, who would probably find the sheer complexity of the patterns overwhelming. but i wondered what might happen if those interlinked curves of color might work as solid elements, not just for decoration but structure in a piece. taking as inspiration the idea of the roma (also romany, though i’m not sure which actual members of this culture prefer and i’m happy to change my terminology if any of you are and wish to let me know what is the correct or most appropriate term) horse-wagons in a loose sense. that overlapping curved top and ranked design was a starting place but my abstract sensibilities felt the need to make it asymmetrical rather than just having the center of the arc be in the middle of the piece rather than at the edge of the bed. this configuration is far closer to traditional korean and japanese structures from the first millennium but it feels surprisingly fresh more than a thousand years later when transposed indoors.

i personally like this color combination but any combination of colors would work just as well here, depending on the target audience. even shades of gray or simply frosted white or black panels would have much the same effect. this is a piece where construction details and methods are likely of significance, though. before continuing with that, i want to make a few other points about the lack of shelving and divisions. adding extra divisions on the long shelves is certainly possible but it impedes the visual openness and i feel it is unnecessary – bookends would be preferable to dividers from an aesthetic perspective and these shelves can be used from both sides. a rank of books facing out and a different set facing in would be an excellent use of space and doesn’t feel like it adds and weight to the unit. extra shelving above the desk would require an extra pair of supports that looks out of place or extremely lightweight shelving mounted only connected to the back using a cantilevered design. even that, however, feels like it takes away from the open-concept nature of this piece, which is already quite heavy from a visual perspective with its low overhang on the bed side and its deep color palette.

one last thing before talking about actually building the piece rather than just the design. i have designed two variants of this, not just multiple sizes for different mattresses. one has a solid roof, the other with wood-framed plexiglass skylights (or, potentially, simply open to the air, the plexiglass inserts resting on mounts anyway and easily removed). some people like being able to look up at color while others prefer having more visual openness and light. it’s an aesthetic choice and i believe both work, though i personally prefer the skylight version.

in terms of construction, the frame of this piece is all built using walnut and loose-tenon joinery. the only complex work is in the headboard (which isn’t difficult, just a bit of a layout nightmare) and the roof (which is, i admit, one of the more practically-difficult things i’ve designed but not for the reason other woodworkers might immediately think as they’re probably looking at creating those curves in the wrong plane, making the whole thing a true disaster of complexity). let’s look at how it’s built starting with the headboard – i assume square-profile rectangular prisms and loose-tenon joinery don’t need an explanation and the drawers are inset-groove and rabbet construction with laminated fronts and inset holes as pulls rather than protruding ones, keeping with the flat and simple colorful motif. to create the headboard, there are two options – plywood lamination or steam-bending. that overlooks the obvious, though. a single board doesn’t have to be cut only in directions perpendicular to its axes – these frame arcs are actually cut from walnut boards as outlined curves rather than trying to bend anything. imagine the board with its edge facing straight up and its face pointing to the bed. tip the left side of the board at an angle until the board covers the area of the arc then scribe and cut each arc on a board in that orientation. this goes against the standard notion of what direction the wood in a curve will follow but it is beneficial in this case, leaving the beautiful face-grain of the walnut facing the bed rather than the ceiling – an added benefit of this method. the colored panels are simply plywood laminated to thickness with plastic veneer adhered to the outside (the adherence method of choice here is structural epoxy, by the way, if that’s useful to know, though many glues will work for this, even, contrary to popular-believe, pva, which is surprisingly strong bonding to plastic if the mating surface is sufficiently scored and roughed before the process is completed – i have done this with epoxy, pva and polyurethane glues, beyond strict urea-formaldahyde glues specifically for veneering, with good results in all cases but far better strength from epoxy, unsurprisingly, as it is a plastic-to-plastic bond). unlike the other colored panels in this work, which are all flush with their walnut mounts, the headboard offsets the colored panels to give more visual depth but, more importantly, allowing the panel to sit in a groove running around the inside of the headboard pieces, giving extra strength to a piece that will be leaned on for years. this might be a good time to point out something obvious about the framing material, by the way. i designed and imagined this as walnut with colored accents but it is, unlike most of my design work, not married to the choice of material – this would work well with oak or cherry but it could even be done with pure white or black frame pieces and have much the same aesthetic but a completely different mood sensibility. it is only pictured here in detail in the way it was conceived but it is interesting to imagine it, for example, with a bleached-oak frame and a series of blues from dark to pastel as color accents, conveying a completely different look and feel. a sample of three of these alternatives is added at the end of the photographs to show just one potential way to adapt it to other desires for color.

the real question, though, is how to build the roof structure. the simple answer, from my perspective, is to apply veneer to multiple arcs cut from plywood and that is my construction method of choice for this entire piece beyond its frame. let’s begin with the frame, however. the same strategy is employed for cutting the arcs as those on the headboard. the arcs are significantly larger, though, so they have to be constructed from multiple edge-laminated segments of walnut. if attention is paid to the grain structure, though, and layout is done carefully, the joins are invisible at all but the closest distance and the curve hides any glue line as it’s not in-line with the horizon or the edge. the frame pieces running parallel to the long axis of the bed are simpler. they are cut to square-dimensional shape then the entire piece is assembled and these are smoothed by sanding to the existing line from a template. the arc is quite gentle across any section as narrow as those frame pieces and sanding the curve required takes only a few minutes by hand. the colored panels are a different story, however. forming them in this way would be cumbersome and – not to dwell on the point too much – silly and wasteful. the answer to these is far more pragmatic. the curve is cut in the same way as the walnut edges but there is no need to do it from large, laminated sections as each panel only needs to be made independently. the long frame pieces are joined using loose-tenon joinery to avoid the need for lapped joints and the same procedure is used for the colored panels, too. they are done using a set of laminations in cross-section of plywood then the entire panel for each block is veneered on two faces with colored plastic veneer, as the flat panels were done, using a vacuum press. this process is relatively straightforward and only requires good glue adhesion. each panel is cut for loose-tenons then the whole roof structure is assembled and glued, lifted and mounted to the top, again using loose-tenon joinery as is the case for the rest of the piece.

one last construction detail remains. the optional skylights are cut perpendicular to the plane tangent to the center of the curvature of the roof. the way this is done is actually quite simple. each panel that is receiving a skylight inset is put in a jig where it is mounted with its central curvature tangent to the horizontal structure of the jig and template-routed using a plunge-router descending as if it was flat against the its plate. the only caveat to this is that it requires a long bit but that is not a significant problem as such bits, while somewhat prohibitively-priced are easily-sourced. this could be done on a shaper but there’s no need for such heavy equipment for fairly small panels and insets, not to mention their geometric simplicity. once the skylight holes have been routed, 8mm walnut strips that have been bent around forms using steam are attached to the rims and sanded flush. the only bond necessary here is glue between the edge-strips and the plywood as this is a non-structural joint and it is wood-to-wood with no potential for seasonal movement shifting the segments.

final thoughts

of course, this is only the end of the first stage and i have four more forms to go but i have some initial conclusions. the first is that this is an amazing exercise and i would recommend it to any furniture designers looking to explore their ideas. the second is that what i have come up with in this more abstract way, without being restricted by my usual requirements of “what the client will buy” or, more frequently, “what the students can build in a unit or semester” has truly surprised me and stimulated what i hope will be some interesting ideas in future pieces. one final note, it’s important not to become too complex and theoretical. while i was working on this, i found myself having to be very careful to remain true to the idea of things i can actually build and that people might actually want in their homes – this is a cautionary note because i found myself drifting all-too-often. that being said, i hope you will all take this challenge with me and design at least one style of each piece on the list. those five forms, once again, were bed, chair, cabinet-on-stand, tea-box/jewelry-box and stool. see what you come up with – you don’t have to share but i encourage you not simply to put your designs out there but to reflect on them like i have and explore your inspiration and motivation for each decision you made. it will make you a better and more self-aware designer. until the next stage is complete, may the force and the fusion be with you. thanks for reading.

woodworking gifts — christmas 2021 edition

[estimated reading time 12 minutes]

every year, one of the big questions on everyone’s mind as the seasons get snowy and trees start to get used for decoration rather than just furniture is what to buy the woodworker in your life for christmas. so let’s think about a bunch of small things, another bunch of less-small things and a few rather large things pretty-much every woodworker will smile finding under the tree christmas morning. this isn’t an exhaustive list and (warning) some of these involve the use of electricity so if the woodworker in your life is actually morally opposed to the use of electrons those might be off-limits. i’m an equal-opportunity offender when it comes to how to shape wood, though, so they are welcome in my shop any day.

before we get on to the specifics, though, there’s one gift every woodworker is always happy to receive regardless of season, time or quantity. wood. want to find your way into the heart of someone who builds things? give them some beautiful raw materials and they’ll forever be grateful. it might help to know what their favorites are but here are a few basic suggestions.

exotic wood is expensive. it’s always nice to have a few small pieces to use as decoration and a little goes a long way. if you’re in north america, this usually means things like wenge, bubinga, ebony, cocobolo, padauk and zebrawood. if you can get your hands on a few of the hardcore rare african or australian species, that’s likely to be appreciated, too. remember, a single nice example is far more desirable than large quantities of poor-quality wood — that’s never going to end up in a project anyway.

domestic wood tends to be expensive, too. seriously, wood is a disaster for the wallet in recent years. that’s not because it’s not worth it. it’s simply that most woodworkers are operating at a loss because they’re doing it as a hobby rather than selling enough of their work to make a profit. that means every new investment in lumber is another trip into the painful area of throwing good money after enjoyment. that being said, north-american domestic species like maple, walnut, cherry, oak (white or even red) and ash won’t go astray in just about any workshop, especially if they are either very straight-grained (ask your hardwood dealer if you’re not sure but it should be visually-obvious) or highly-figured. take a look at the pieces coming from the shop and see what wood is used in them already — some more of that is probably going to be well-received.

some woodworkers like softwood (pine, fir, spruce, cedar, etc) but that tends to be far less expensive and a lot of us (like me) simply don’t use it unless we have to so that’s not going to light up the eyes on christmas morning the same way a nice board of curly maple or figured walnut will.

the last piece of advice about wood is that woodworkers come in three main flavors when it comes to wood — the ones who work with softwood all the time, lovers of hardwood (knights of the white oak unite!) and passionate advocates for veneer. i happen to be in the second and third camps — i love working with good-quality veneer. if you’re connected to a woodworker who is down with the veneer and has started to ride that train, that’s another beautiful thing to provide — a few sheets of burl or highly-figured decorative veneer can be acquired relatively inexpensively and that’s far easier to wrap than a stack of white oak. anyway, if you’ve taken an interest in their life, you probably already know this. just don’t think wood is a tacky or meaningless gift. we truly do want more of it. always. there’s no such thing as an overfilled woodstack if you’re building things on a regular basis.

consumables

there are many things that can appear in the stocking that will never go astray. it doesn’t matter if we already have them. we can always have more these come in two varieties — consumables and multiples. i’ll get to the multiples in a minute.

consumables are things like glue, sandpaper, pencils, chalk and even epoxy.

there are many varieties of glue but most of us use the same three types all the time. the vast majority is done with basic wood-glue — and the dramatically-most-popular of those is titebond. you’ll probably never go wrong with a bottle or two of titebond (especially 3) in the stocking. there’s no shortage of uses for it and you can never have too much. it lasts years if unopened and sometimes even after it has been if stored properly. so it won’t go to waste. cyanoacrylate glue (also called “super” or “crazy”) comes in various types but you can usually find it in thin, thick and gel. thick and gel are a bit more specialty-focused and most of us probably don’t use them much. but for quick repairs, making jigs and dealing with plastic in the shop, thin ca is something that’s always nice to have around — if your woodworker is also a turner, this is even more typically the case. the third type isn’t really a glue at all but a liquid plastic — epoxy. whether you’re doing full-on epoxy resin as a decorative element or just using it the way i do as a way to fill cracks and glue pieces together, a serious two-part epoxy (totalboat, west system) or even a five-minute epoxy for shop tasks is definitely something just about every woodworker will use and, being liquid plastic, this won’t go bad — a properly-stored bottle of epoxy, as it only works after it’s been mixed together, will literally last decades.

sandpaper is the gift that keeps on … wearing out. whether it’s the kind you’re using by hand or the type to fit the random-orbit sander (you’ll have to check which kind they need but hand-use sandpaper is always useful regardless), sandpaper is part of pretty-much every project in the shop. skip the really low grits, though. we’re not talking about rough carpentry here. 120, 180, 220, 320, 400 and 800 are extremely useful. if you’re looking at working with a lot of epoxy or you’re turning things like pens and handles, 1200, 2000 and beyond might be helpful. but a nice new stash of 220 and 320 is probably never going to go astray — especially the hard-to-find and overpriced stick-backed sandpaper that makes construction of sanding blocks and sticks so much less annoying! 3m makes great paper as does klingspor but if you go to any woodworking supply shop they’ll have a few different good-quality brands. most people don’t care too much as long as the paper is fresh — especially if it’s free.

pencils and chalk are always useful in the shop for marking — as are markers like sharpies. i can’t begin to describe how many pieces of chalk (multicolored if you can find a good selection) and disposable mechanical pencils (.5mm is generally the most useful for me) have disappeared over the years. a few boxes of chalk and packs of mechanical pencils will always be appreciated. there’s nothing like being able to mark an accurate line or make a quick note on a piece of wood without having to go searching for a pencil on the other side of the shop. having dozens of extras lying around all over the place is generally a happy place to be. there’s nothing special about a pencil, practically-speaking. just the cheap ones from the office-supply store or box-store will work just fine if you have enough of them — they’re going to get lost faster than wear out, anyway.

multiples

there are various things in the shop you can never have enough of. not just pencils, though that’s definitely the first thing that comes to mind. here are a few of the others, though, that are inexpensive and, even if they already have one, they’ll be happy to have.

squares. my most-used square is a 150mm combination square but i have several of those, some 300s, 600s, 100s, etc. you can’t have too many of them. even a few cheap ones never go astray. i recommend starrett if you can afford it because they’re awesome but there are various other good brands, too. johnson makes a really nice one that’s very affordable and irwin’s is ok but a bit less precise. anyway, a few combination squares and you can just about do anything in the shop. try-squares, machinists’ squares and 1-2-3 blocks are also definitely on the list of useful squares for shop-use, though i find i only really reach for the combination ones unless i’m working on setting up a machine — then i use the machinists’ square, as you might expect. in theory, you can have more squares than you need. but i can’t imagine anyone ever complaining about it.

rulers. measuring is important. remember that thing about measuring twice and cutting once? most of us end up measuring a dozen times for every cut. just because it’s so hard to put the wood back once you’ve cut it off. again, i recommend starrett but short, medium, long, really-long, whatever you can get. metal rulers with etched numbers are truly important and invaluable in the shop. my most-used is (like the square) a 150mm but i use my 300 all the time and a 1200 is awesome for larger projects. a tape-measure is a necessity but having more than one of those isn’t all that helpful as they’re not used that much. metal rulers, though, are worth their weight in … iron.

many woodworkers (probably the vast majority) don’t agree with me about marking. i believe in using a pencil, always a pencil and only a pencil, never a knife. i have reasons for this and there are absolutely justifiable ways to get better-quality joinery and higher levels of accuracy this way. but it’s a decision and a way of working. most do their marking with knives. that means a few extra marking-knives are definitely useful to them. other marking tools it’s useful to have multiples of if you cut your marks rather than pencil them include marking and mortising gauges. if you check out the ones listed from veritas, grammercy and igaging, they’re all good-quality and i have no doubt they’ll be well-received — unless, of course, you’re like me and simply don’t use them. but i’m in a small minority and i still find them beautiful and fun to make from kits.

which brings us to an interesting aside. if you’re going to buy a tool for a woodworker, there’s often the option to get it as a kit they can make. that’s almost always going to be the more fun approach. even if they don’t want the tool, they’ll enjoy the making and probably give the tool away after and be very happy for the excuse to get in the shop and make something quickly.

other things that are useful to have multiples of, by the way, are clamps. i really like bar and pipe clamps but quick-clamps and f-style clamps are really useful in the shop, too. some woodworkers (not me) really like wooden hand-screw clamps. i find them slow and annoying to use but most don’t agree with me on this and actually like them for many tasks. whatever they’ve already got a few of and use regularly, though, is probably a good bet. having more clamps is good. having less is … usually an excuse to go buy some cause they’re so useful in the middle of a project. i’ve never heard of a woodworker who doesn’t want more clamps.

kits

beyond the basics of marking gauges and small things, there are many kits out there for woodworkers. but the ones i usually recommend are for saws. grammercy and blackburn (among many others) make kits for frame-saws, turning-saws and other specialty tools. while these aren’t necessarily going to get used all the time in an average shop, they’re fun to make and usually relatively inexpensive. i highly recommend them as gifts — the grammercy kits for the 36” frame-saw and 12” turning saw are particularly nice things to play with.

it’s also fun to make handles. many tools are available unhandled or simply come with worn-out ones. you can never have too many chisels. the thing to keep in mind, though, is that you probably want to ask a reputable vintage tool dealer before parting with any of your money. whether it’s american-style or japanese, a good-quality old chisel is going to cost some actual money — what you can pick up for five bucks is probably worth exactly nothing. if your woodworking gift-recipient is a fan of the vintage tools, though, a beautiful example of history is probably going to be a great place, especially if it’s something where the steel is a bit out of their typical price-range because it looks like it needs a new handle, something we can all quickly remedy with a few hours in the shop.

small tools

speaking of chisels, you really can’t have enough of them. but they vary a lot in quality and size. there are a few chisels that will almost always be well-received, though.

most of us have neglected our collections of the very-small, very-large and speciality. a chisel of the 2/3mm or 36-60mm range is probably something most people don’t have nearly enough of and that’s extremely useful. these are outside the range of typical kits and are usually purchased only as single chisels. you might want to check on favorite brands or at least favorite styles (japanese or american in particular) but here are a few guidelines. for an expensive chisel, narex and two cherries are good american-style brands. better quality chisels are made by veritas and lie nielsen. you won’t go wrong with those. japanese chisels are generally made by individual makers and vary much more in quality (and price). if you go to a reputable dealer (hida, iida, etc) they’ll point you in the right direction — just pick your budget and tool of choice and it’ll be pretty easy to choose. skew and fishtail chisels are useful and most woodworkers don’t actually have them — or at least don’t have enough of them. those are usually nice things to get and hobbyists rarely find the excuse to spend the money on them.

another tool that fits in the hand and is always useful, even if you already have one or two of them, is a block plane. no, it’s not the most useful plane. but you can pick them up cheaply — both low-angle and standard-angle — and having a few setup at different depths is useful for many tasks. i like to keep one really light, one really heavy and one medium one so i don’t have to adjust them if possible. and they’re used with one hand so they’re far less exhausting for tiny adjustments than picking up a heavy full-size plane.

other fun tools in this size and price range include spokeshaves, drawknives, rasps and files. they’re small, easy to ship and wrap and constantly useful — even if you’ve never used them before. as spokeshaves go, the veritas and lie nielsen ones are truly awesome but even the cheap amazon ones are wonderful to play with. there are many drawknives out there but for the money i think the mora is probably the best deal. rasps and files range from the incredibly-cheap (avoid those) to the extremely-expensive (beautiful but usually unnecessary). aim for something reasonably-priced and you’ll probably get it right. ones sold at woodworking shops tend to be quite good regardless of brand — i’ve never seen a bad file or rasp at a shop like woodcraft, though many bad ones are sold at hardware stores every day.

if your gift-recipient hasn’t done much carving, that might be another place to look for something interesting for them to play with. there are excellent starter sets from narex, flexcut, pfeil, mora and two cherries that range from the under-a-hundred-bucks range to two or three, depending on your budget. if they’re just starting, i’d suggest one of two places to begin. two cherries has a few fantastic sets for under a hundred dollars with six or seven tools in each — they’re all excellent. if you’re looking for something a bit more niche, though, mora makes some great spoon-carving knives. to get started, a sloyd-knife, tight-hook and loose-hook are all you need and that’s pretty inexpensive. while you’re at it, a small carving hatchet or axe might be helpful but i understand not everyone wants to put such a dangerous-looking tool under the tree, especially if there are kids around. so that might be an addition for another day. there are amazing handmade tools for carving and they’re definitely, in some cases, worth the money. but starting out the difference isn’t significant and it’s usually better to start with the inexpensive ones and see if it’s really something enjoyed in the first place, anyway.

not-so-small tools

there are a few other things i generally recommend as gifts for woodworkers, though this may be a bit more controversial. i believe in exploring what’s out there rather than sticking to the tried-and-true tools. as such, i think everyone should experiment with japanese saws. if you don’t have one, it’s worth a couple of days playing and some really excellent saws are available that work on the pull-stroke for very little money.

if you pick up a suizan dozuki, it will definitely give you a different understanding of what a fine, precise cut is. whether you decide in a few months you really love the thing and want to use it for all your fine joinery or you simply want to chalk it up to experience and go back to your american-style saw, you can get them for under forty bucks and that’s less than you’d pay for a lot of other far-less-educational and far-less-fun experiences. other good brands of japanese saws include z-saw and gyokucho but i have found the suizan to be the best value. i recommend a dozuki as your first japanese saw but a kataba or ryoba are both great choices, too.

the other saw your woodworking recipient may not have is a bushcraft saw. i find these extremely useful, especially the folding ones. you never know when you’ll have to chop down a small tree somewhere or take off some branches — or, like me, use it in the shop for rough cutting boards to length and shape. i think every workshop can be supplemented by and enjoy the use of a silky gomboy. they’re thick-plated, nearly-indestructible saws with replaceable blades that fold and are light enough to stick in your backpack and simply keep there (unless you’re going through a security checkpoint cause, you know, it’s a saw). if you have one, you’ll find new uses for it. it’s like a pocket-knife but without being limited to things the size of an apple.

one last little tool, though these often come in kits of multiples, which is great, too — card-scrapers. while i’m a huge proponent of sanding, a card-scraper will save you so much time both with preparing for finish and getting things in the right shape in the first place. dfm makes some great ones — a few flat and curved ones make a great little collection. while you’re at it, get a burnisher (carbide if you can find it because that’ll make your life far easier).

brands

i don’t usually include this specifically but i keep getting asked for specifics so here it is. i highly-recommend talking to a reputable tool dealer in your area but here are some excellent brands to pick something up from… almost anything they make will probably be happily-received under the tree this christmas. it’s not a complete list but it’ll get you started.

  • veritas
  • lie nielsen
  • woodriver
  • starrett
  • grammercy
  • blackburn
  • pfeil
  • two cherries
  • silky
  • bearkat
  • dmt
  • knew concepts

if you want a reputable dealer for japanese tools in america, i recommend hida or iida. there are definitely others but these are two i have had great experience with and they’ll point you in the right direction for the right brand and item for your budget. having a relationship with a good tool dealer is a great thing for any woodworker (or woodworking partner)!

thoughts

well, merry christmas and all that. seriously, though, if you’re shopping for the woodworker in your life, i hope i’ve made that task a little easier. good luck with the rest of your holiday tasks!

kane tsugi picture-frame

[estimated reading time 7 minutes]

(click here to download the detailed 3d diagrams with measurements.)

one of the most common things i’m asked to demonstrate is traditional japanese joinery – realistically, though, while i certainly prefer japanese methods, the joints are often more complex than are needed in contemporary furniture and the traditional mortise-and-tenon and dovetail used in the west are actually the most common in japanese furniture construction, too. the more-obviously-asian joints are relatively rare in practical applications but they can be beautiful and extremely strong. perhaps the most visibly-appealing of these joints is one that’s more often faked than cut as a functional joint – the kane tsugi. without getting into all the specifics of translation, though, the easiest way to think of this joint is as a pinned-mitered-bridal-joint. if you’re curious why it’s called a “bridal-joint”, it has male and female sides and i’ll leave the rest to your imagination. it results in strong picture-frame joints that never shift and the visual interest makes it obvious this is a handmade frame – no mass-produced machine process is going to go to all this trouble!

that being said, it’s a time-consuming joint to cut but nothing particualrly difficult. if you can draw some lines and use a chisel to carefully pare to them, this should be no problem. you’ll need a small backsaw, a couple of chisels, a hammer (or mallet) to hit the chisels, a straight-edge paring block, a pencil (of course) and, perhaps, a drill (electric or hand-powered makes no difference as long as you can drill straight with it) – you can definitely cut the hole with a chisel but i’d personally avoid that because it significantly increases the difficulty of the whole project and the result is the same.

the first thing to do is to prepare your stock. i am building this (as you can see from the pictures) from cherry with walnut pegs but you can use any wood you like. cherry (sakura) is one of the most traditional woods in japan and it’s one of my favorites to work with. i’m using walnut pegs simply because they provide visual contrast but you can use the same species for those if you prefer – i’ve also done this with brass or aluminum pegs for a more industrial look.

first, square your stock at 80x18mm then cut to length. i suggest leaving yourself a little extra when you cut but the lengths you’re aiming for in the finished piece are 400mm rails and 560mm stiles. if you cut them to 420 and 580, you should have plenty of extra material to pare away and guarantee perfect 45-degree miters.

while you’re preparing stock, the other things you’ll need are four pins. these will be 12mm squares and i suggest making them at least 40mm long to make them easy to insert later. don’t prepare your back or glass until you’ve finished all the joinery unless you’re exceptionally confident in your precision. it’s far easier to fit a back once you’ve got the rest already in-place.

we’ll cut the rails first. either is fine but i find it easier to cut a mortise then shape the tenon to fit. a bit of layout. lay your stile across your rail flush against the end and draw a line where they intersect. this line should be 80mm from the end. repeat this on all four ends of your rails. if it’s not 80mm (check with your ruler), figure out why it’s not. precision is important and, while you can definitely do things with different measurements, the first time is far easier if everything is precisely as expected. this isn’t a simple 45-degree miter-joint and it’s easy to get lost if things get a little different. do the same with your stiles using a rail to draw your lines. the drawings on the faces and edges should be the same on both rails and stiles. don’t forget to label them “left”, “right”, “top” and “bottom” on the front face of each. it is easy to get confused – i’ve definitely had it happen.

you should now have an 80mm square on the end of each rail. draw a diagonal from the outside point to the inside point of each square.

from the inside point of that square, draw a 48mm square then a 12mm square in the center of that square (18mm from each face).

turn the boards and draw lines 6mm from both faces on the outside edges. these are the guidelines for your mortises and tenons.

mark your waste. if you’re not sure what’s going to be waste, take a look at the diagrams both in 2d and 3d. the idea is that we’re going to be cutting a miter on the outside corner and a mortise in the rails to accept a tenon on each end of each stile. don’t worry about the rabbets for the back and glass yet. we’ll cut those once the rest of the frame is already assembled.

the first thing to cut shouldn’t be your miters. cut the straight edges first. on the rails, this will be a 48mm-deep cut 32mm from each end. don’t aim for your line. give yourself at least 1mm to pare to – much more if you’re not precise with your saw. when you have those done on each end, complete the squares and you should have a 48x32mm rectangle cut from each rail. repeat this on the stiles the same way. the cuts are rotated but the dimensions are all the same.

how to cut the angles is a good question. i think it’s easier to simply skip the saw and go straight to a guide-block and cut them with a chisel. you’re welcome to use a saw if you prefer but don’t get too close to your lines. pare with a chisel for accuracy. start with the rails then move on and do the same for the stiles. with the rectangle already removed, it should be simple to connect the inside point of the missing rectangles with the outside points of the rails and stiles. if it’s worked properly, you’ll have a rectangle and a right-triangle missing from each piece.

now comes the difficult part. cutting the mortises and tenons. yes, you can use a saw for this. i don’t. remember the outside faces need to be accurate but everything else is hidden within the joint so you can be significantly less precise there. just make sure you don’t have gaps on the outside and the rest can be shaved thinner to make the joint easier to fit – the pin will hold it together even if there’s not a complete bond with the glue.

use a thin chisel (3-4mm) to make a mortise in the end of each rail. you’re aiming for 48mm deep but if you go deeper on the inside it’s totally fine – it just has to be at least deep enough to fit the mating piece. dig the entire mortise at the width of your chisel then bring in a larger chisel (32/36mm is my recommendation) to widen it to 6mm.

on the stiles, the process is far easier, which is why we left it until now – it’s easier to make this fit the mortise than to keep going back to try to get the mortise exactly the right size. start about 1mm from your line and chop down with your large chisel along the entire line to create a stop-cut – hold the bevel away from the line. now flip the bevel and angle the chisel at 45-degrees, move it a few millimeters into your tenon and chop out the v. go back to the first line you made and go deeper, repeating the same thing. do this for the entire tenon. all your cuts should be across the grain. if they’re not, you’re doing it wrong and the piece will split. be careful.

if your joint fits, that’s fantastic. if it doesn’t, you can continue to pare your tenon using a chisel or use sandpaper to make sure it’s smooth there and inside your mortise. when they’re all exactly 6mm-thick, the joint should slide together with light pressure from a mallet or clamp. glue it together. yes, i’m aware we haven’t made the holes for the pins yet. apply clamping pressure left-to-right, top-to-bottom and, most-importantly, front-to-back on the joints. check for square. if it’s not square, force it to be. you won’t hurt it. it’ll thank you later.

once all four joints are seating properly, take out your drill and drill the four holes straight through the completed joints at 8-10mm. don’t drill at 12mm unless you want larger holes. use your 3 or 6mm chisel to make these holes square through each joint. with those holes made, put glue in the holes and drive your pegs through. you can leave the pegs proud, round them or cut them flush. i like to cut them flush for a more contemporary look. totally up to you.

you don’t need to use clamps for that. once it’s all dry and your pegs are trimmed, you can cut your rabbets. use a straight-edge and saw to make 6mm-deep rabbets 6mm from each inside edge on the back. i’ll say that again – on the back. i’ve made this mistake before. i will never make it again, i hope. if you do, it just means you’re switching which face is the front but you’ve probably picked the nicest faces for the front and it’s disappointing if you have to switch now. there are many ways to cut a rabbet – you can even use a trim-router if you like. i do it with a saw and finish the inside corners with a large chisel. yes, it’s easier to cut them before you glue the piece together. but they never line up perfectly and cutting them after ensures no gaps. take your pick. i do it after.

sand. thoroughly. at least to 400 but this is a display of your woodworking prowess. i’d go to at least 1000/1200 and make the thing shine. apply finish (i suggest 6-10 coats of thin shellac) and let it dry.

cut your back and glass to the size of your opening, seat them and pin them in place.

now you have a picture-frame. i hope you’ve enjoyed building with me today. this is a very functional joint, extremely stable and secure, though not the simplest to cut. perhaps you’ll find other uses for it in your daily woodworking. where it typically shows up is in frame-and-panel construction – perhaps make a desktop or doors using this as a way to accent your edges. thanks for taking the time to explore japanese joinery with me. until next time…

searching in the garden

[estimated reading time 2 minutes]

as mina rounded the corner on her way home from another unfulfilling day at college, she was confronted by the silhouette of her grandmother bent on the ground, face almost touching the grass in front of the house. she burst into a run and, within a few meters of her grandmother, suddenly stopped and began staring. she hadn’t collapsed. she was actively searching for something but obviously not finding it.

grandma, i’m home. i’ll help you look.

her grandmother’s face began to shine with pleasure to see mina and she was obviously relieved because her eyesight left much to be desired and young eyes should have guaranteed success.

i’m glad you’re here! now i’ll be able to find my glasses.

you dropped your glasses out here?

no. i dropped them in the living room. but it’s so dark in there i can’t see. out here it’s bright so i have a chance of finding them.

this is a traditional buddhist story about enlightenment. a diligent search in the light, however well-intentioned and devoted, will never lead to wisdom or understanding. enlightenment is impossible unless we confront and accept not only the light, the happiness and goodness in ourselves but the darkness and confusion, the suffering and imbalance found there, too.

mina’s grandmother is putting a lot of effort into her search and she is doing it where there is an excellent chance of finding something — the problem is that she won’t find what she’s looking for there, though perhaps she will discover something else. this could lead to confusion in many ways. the first is that she will eventually become discouraged and disinterested by her fruitless search. the other is that she may mistake whatever she finds for the object of her search — her glasses in this case or enlightenment in ours.

what buddhism preaches is revolutionary acceptance. not simply accepting the good but looking deeply at the darkness and problems in our lives and understanding that we will have to start from wherever we are rather than fighting against the things that are already true and present around us. if we don’t accept the situation, we will be locked in a struggle with reality and reality always wins. when we accept it, it doesn’t mean we have to see our current place as good, only recognize it as true. from that moment of acceptance, we start looking in the right place for our enlightenment — the place where we are.

thank you for reading. your eyes have done me a great honor today.