Category: blog

[estimated reading time 25 minutes]

the difference between art and craft is not form but purpose. art has a single reason to exist, to convey emotion, typically through a search for beauty and meaning. craft has a different one, to be functionally useful in the moment. while much art effectively tells a story and craft is often overwhelmingly beautiful, art only needs to stimulate feeling to be worthwhile and craft can simply give you a place to put your body when you’re tired.

poetry is art while prose is craft. prose is language for communication. its words may be exceptionally beautiful but rarely are. what is important is not how it tells a story but that the narrative is understood. prose written to be difficult to understand has lost its purpose completely and is not language, simply an assault on humanity. easily-comprehensible common grammar, however, with generalized vocabulary is the gold-standard in prose. it has a clear purpose. communication. poetry doesn’t have to communicate anything — and most rarely does. while it may tell a story or paint a picture, it is its emotional payload that is its primary reason to exist and, once that is present, it needs nothing else.

much like walking into an art gallery or visiting a concert hall to experience a symphony, poetry may be understood at various levels. one of the marks of poetry is its multiple-comprehension potential. not all poetry has a deeper meaning but, if it is well-written by a poet who understands the artform, it has at least two. this is not, however, a jigsaw-puzzle, where each piece has its place and there is a riddle to solve. a poem has a structural meaning, telling a story or painting a picture for the purpose of emotional stimulation. if there is a deeper meaning, which there usually is, this is not something to be solved. it is something to be created as a partnership between the poem and the reader. the poet is no longer involved. they have cast their hat into the ring and what happens now no longer depends on their input or interests. trying to find “the correct deeper meaning” is a fool’s errand and it simply doesn’t exist.

searching for a comprehensible basic first-level understanding of a poem is often cryptic and confusing, bogged-down with complex grammar, language, references to history, literature or even other poetry, culture, religion and philosophy. discovering the “simple” meaning is often far from easy as this is not necessarily obvious. it is, however, a task that can be learned with practice and mastered much like any other skill — anything is possible to develop in time and nothing worth doing can be learned quickly. the deeper meaning is a creative exercise — it is the answer to “what could this signify for me in this place and time and with my experience?” while the simple, plain, structural meaning is closer to “what is the story being told?”. it is important to remember this is never “what does the poet intend?” or “what story are they trying to tell?” — the poet has created a work of art. what it means for them is valid but no more than what it means for the reader. interpretation is a recipient-only task, not a conversation between poet and audience. the risk the poet takes in publication is giving up control of the words. the reward can be profligate and immeasurable. but it is a complete absence of ownership that many poets find exceedingly difficult. it is, however, still very much the case — the reader must process the emotions and images through their own lens and experience or the poetry is worthless. while prose is a conversation, successful only if the intended message is received intact and understood, poetry is a stylized broadcast, emotion poured into the world to fluctuate freely in the minds of recipients, often crafted into things completely outside the realm of anticipation or even understanding of the poet. this is both its magic and its curse. i offer what follows as an example of interpretation at multiple depths but this is not the only way to understand this work. i am well-aware of this, knowing this is my own yet i have given it to the audience and can never take back control. thankfully, i no longer desire it and feel freed by sending my words into the world.

the poem i will use as an example is a standalone work called “fallen”. it is, loosely-understood, the story of a tree becoming furniture. my three passions in life are language, teaching and woodworking — in this poem, i combine all three, something i rarely take the opportunity to do so thoroughly. let’s explore it together, first at the most basic level, piece-by-piece.

we’ll begin with the outline. the tree, given the ability to think and feel like a human, realizes it is being chopped down. it hits the ground and is milled, prepared as lumber, kiln-dried, roughed, joined, smoothed, finished and lives a long life as a piece of furniture, reflecting on its forgotten life as a tree and remembered life as wood.

the first thing to look at when studying a poem is the title. stories, articles and books are expected to have titles. it’s not optional in the modern world. the titles are often meaningless afterthoughts simply because a title is a necessity. poetry isn’t like that. many, perhaps most poems have no titles and are simply referred to by their opening lines, main themes or “untitled” with a sequential number. given how common this is, when a poet chooses to attach a specific title, most frequently a single word, this word tends to carry significance. in this case, the poem is called “fallen” — this is both realistic and allegorical. it refers to the tree having fallen, life having ended and expectations having changed. but it remembers that humans, moving from the innocence of animal behavior to agriculture and tool-use, are considered “fallen”, too, as the book of genesis describes it — no longer just part of nature but enlightened in a dark and dangerous sense, welcomed to the ability to think instead of living lives only of reaction as animals do. this is an early indicator of the fact that the poem can be read at multiple levels — not surprising, given its existence as a poem, however.

1. reaching for the dawn i suddenly collapse

the tree is doing two things here but before looking at what they are it is significant to pay attention to who is speaking. the tree is not simply the subject of the poem and the topic of the sentence but the subject. the tree is speaking. this lets us know this is going to be a poem more deeply-rooted in a fantastic suspension of reality than most — a human tree isn’t something you find in the forest when you go for a walk but it is an interesting symbolic impossibility to contemplate. the other thing is the tense. while most poetry is written in a reflective way, this included, it takes place in the present. given the length of the poem, it’s obvious that the entire thing doesn’t happen in that moment so it tells us there is a progressive approach to the present tense. this poem will be stream-of-consciousness rather than past-tense reflection or present-tense description. there is action happening in the present and each new present will have new action — or at least new states of contemplation.

the two things the tree is doing here are reaching up and falling. when the tree reaches up for the sky, it is doing the same as every yoga class you’ve ever seen begins with — a sun salutation (सूर्यनमस्कार) or devotional promise and prayer to the sun that combines gratitude and desperate necessity. this, of course, is actually derived from seeing how trees and other plants grow in the direction of the sun. if the sun moves, the plants shift to follow it. while trees don’t typically have the ability to get up and walk around, the shifting position of the sun day by day and year by year can be plotted by the stresses in a tree and the shape of its trunk and leaves. it follows the sun and, metaphorically-speaking, sings its praises every day with its complete attention. the sun is the source of the tree’s life, much as it is ours. the tree is doing exactly what we do every morning, stretch up and wake in the light of dawn, realizing the sun is our only hope for continued life.

this reaching is not simply a physical reality, though. it is hope. the tree, to continue to live, needs to get through the night, another day, another year. we humans look forward and reach for archetypical dawns, not the physical one that comes tomorrow without any doubt or change except in terms of timing — it’s what we call “seeing the light at the end of the tunnel”, an artificial, symbolic dawn that isn’t the sun but a reason to keep living. the tree isn’t just a plant reaching for sunlight. it’s a human reaching for hope.

much like humans in the modern world, grabbing for hope usually results in disaster. the tree suddenly collapses — is this the destruction of hope or simply the absence of being able to physically take continued life and existence from the sun? both apply in this case. because of outside forces, the tree’s life is cut short and its hopes are, if not decimated, certainly changed to new ones — and only if there’s an afterlife, which is a fiction for humans but a definite possibility for lumber.

2. as i feel the carpet pulled from below my feet

“carpet” is literally what we call the soft surface of the ground in a forest covered in leaves and bark and other organic detritus. it’s what makes a natural forest so different from a prepared hiking path. forest floors are soft and it is easy to walk through them silently on a cushion of moist remnants of trees. there are rarely small bushes — they don’t get enough sunlight between the trees. this is a human expression, though — “having the rug pulled from under your legs” means something unexpected and bad has happened to make success impossible. your life has been unquestionably shaken by something. in this case, it’s both physical and metaphysical — when a tree is cut down, it is usually done by cutting an angled notch then sawing from the other side, allowing the bottom of the trunk to “kick-out” in the direction of the notch, looking exactly like a person standing on a carpet that has just been pulled without them expecting it. in theoretical terms, the tree’s expectation of continued life until nutrients disappear or fire comes to consume it while still alive has suddenly disappeared. with the trunk severed, life stops. it doesn’t have any expectation of continued or renewed life — no new testament of ridiculous promises of salvation and resurrection. for the tree, falling is the end much as for humans falling is a one-way-street with a brick wall somewhere in the future.

3. an unexpected noise woke me yet i imagined myself safe

whether the tree is being chopped down with an axe or saw or something far more modern and fueled by electricity or gas is irrelevant. you can’t cut a tree down without sudden loud noise. if the tree was asleep — trees do, in fact, sleep every night, their cellular processes slowing down in the cold and diminished sugar production as photosynthesis pauses when the sun disappears — this is certainly enough to wake anyone. while the tree couldn’t possibly have imagined anything of the kind, a human tree would have thought each day would be much like the last with little variation — perhaps a new bird or fox appearing, finding new pockets of nutrients with the ends of the roots but likely nothing significant to change daily life. with this noise, though, the whole world changes.

that’s how it happens in human life. we continue every day and expect our lives to be predictable. like a newtonian physics problem — movement continues in its current path and direction unless something significant acts on it. but something always does. yet we are shocked when our lives come crashing down around our ears with no more warning than a sudden sound and impact in the dawn — change is something no human enjoys and most are terrified by. change usually signifies whatever we were doing has suddenly failed. the tree was looking forward to a new day of growth. that’s certainly not in the cards.

the other thing to remember here is that we’re not talking about a natural process. it’s not a fire. while those are fast compared to what they are imagined to be, they can be seen coming and expected from a vast distance. when someone intentionally destroys your life, though, that’s often something you’re completely unaware of until it happens — until there is a sudden noise and the world falls apart.

4. only to search for balance and find nothing but fresh bruises

when things go wrong in our lives, we scramble to try to get things back. whether we like the new situation or not, we almost always try to return to the old one. it doesn’t matter if the new situation is inevitable or even improved. we are creatures of habit. the tree is much the same — it searches for balance, both physical and idealized. this is what the buddha spoke of, living a balanced life. remember, “dukkha” is often translated as “pain” or “suffering”, leading to horrible versions of buddhist doctrine as “all life contains suffering” or even “life is suffering” — this is inaccurate. while life does involve suffering, that’s not what he was saying. “dukkha” is “imbalance” or “unpredictability”, which is certainly a function of human life. it is, however, also a function of the life of a tree, especially one that is going to be turned into lumber.

it’s interesting to take a moment to think about how trees are selected. while all trees in an area may be cleared for construction, the vast majority of trees cut down and turned into lumber aren’t clear-cut in the modern age. they are specifically selected. that means the most successful are chopped down, not the weak or dead or vulnerable. strength leads to death. is that how humans treat their own, too? who are the ones on social-media, for example, on the receiving end of the most aggressive hate and criticism and judgment? the most successful of our peers are the ones most often targeted for pain and suffering and so many people believe they deserve it, that they have a right to attack those who are successful simply because that’s what they’ve achieved — something like a status of target accompanying the status of celebrity. the most beautiful tree within view is suddenly ripped from its life. perhaps you can think of humans who have experienced much the same, while being judged as deserving that type of treatment if for no other reason than jealousy.

remember that when a tree hits the ground it really is bruised. this damage can often mean some of the wood is unusable for working — it’s important to make sure a tree falls where it will impact the less-desirable part of its body. but when we humans fall much the same is true. i shelter my face by putting out my hands if i fall. i risk breaking my fingers and arms to avoid shattering my face on the ground. the risk we take in that moment means we know we are about to be hurt and try to select the least painful of results. a tree is built with cushion and protective armor — bark. humans have a protective armor, too — self-repairing skin and padding flesh around our bodies, especially the parts that usually contact objects, an evolutionary result of millions of years of harm. but why “fresh”? because life is full of bruises. a tree in the forest or on an urban lot encounters pain and bruising on a constant basis. these might be minor, what we think of as microaggressions — insults and disrespect. it might be major. like us, the tree tries to repair itself but those bruises never truly heal. do yours? now at the end of its life it has no more chance to repair itself as the last set of bruises remain fresh forever, encapsulated in whatever the tree is used for. like the bruises we take to our graves.

5. my limbs ripped from their sockets while i lay dazed

the first thing that typically happens to a tree once it hits the ground is for its branches to be removed. still “dazed” from the impact and suddenness of its falling, the tree can’t react to this the way it normally would, trying to heal its wounds. its life is over and now the process to tear it to pieces begins. as humans, when we fall, whether it is terminal or simply one of the many falls we encounter, those around us take exorbitant pleasure in tearing our dreams, hopes and thoughts apart. our limbs may remain physically attached but our lives are certainly no more cohesive when we are attacked and damaged than the tree’s, lying on the ground losing its leaves and branches to a chainsaw. a tree does, by the way, have “limb-sockets” the same as a human or animal and the connective tissue linking them for nutrients and exchange of moisture are startlingly similar.

6. yet my life somehow extends as i am torn to nothing more than slices of myself

when a tree is milled, this is usually done in a process called “flat-sawing”. it is put on a surface and sliced end-to-end using a saw, turning it into boards of approximately-equal thickness — usually, for modern lumber, about fifty millimeters. the important part of this line, though, is the beginning. the tree isn’t left there on the ground. it is suddenly aware of the fact that its life isn’t really over in the way it expected. yes, it’s definitely dead in the organic sense. but its life is about to be given back to it, possibly for hundreds of years. this is a shocking development. being torn to slices of itself, physically, is usually how a tree is resurrected. for a human, these slices are usually memories — actually, they’re often memories recorded on physical slices of trees, paper, representing cross-sections of their life. memories fragment over time but records remain, brief glimpses of life, especially if the person has written for public audiences. but those are nothing more than tiny slices of an existence that was a life and suddenly stopped being it. is that resurrection? in the case of the tree, it’s bodily. in the case of a human, reanimation is an idea that died with the egyptians of the middle kingdom, though it is startlingly-commonly-discussed today as if we didn’t know better. what will you be remembered by after you die? what have you left? i have left this poem. how’s that for meta?

7. only alive at the edges though soon to become rived from the past

these glimpses in a human sense are only snapshots seen from a single perspective, like looking at the edges of a thick piece of wood. this is a play on words, though. a board with its original, organic shape from the tree rather than a straight edge is called “live-edge” and this is often used in modern furniture. wood was historically not cut with a saw at this stage but “rived” or split along its grain. instead of the roughness of a saw, a tree can be encouraged to fracture along its organic fault-lines (its yearly shift between soft and hard growth is a natural boundary). humans do much the same. as past becomes present and that becomes new past, we amass fractures where, if pressure is applied, we often break. we can call this post-traumatic stress, triggering or simply being fragile, something all humans are. but it’s no different from the visible lines in a tree signifying it has lived for years and can be easily broken as a result.

this is the end of the first segment (verse is an odd way to look at poems structured episodically like this but it’s an accurate technical term for it).

8. the touch of steel against my face resurrects me

we should probably imagine that this tree is being worked by hand in a woodworker’s shop. sure, it could be machinery doing these things but the care and precision described in the poem is closer to the slow, methodical hands-on process of handtool work. that being said, the work of a plane could be done with a jointer and a saw could be electric rather than handheld and much the same allegorical situation would present itself. it’s probably just easier to picture this being done very slowly and relatively-quietly for the purpose of imagination.

the first thing done to a piece of lumber about to become furniture is generally that it is planed roughly smooth and flat with a fore or jack-plane. this is simply a sharp piece of steel held in place at an angle and rubbed across all the surfaces of the wood — it’s an extremely simple tool that has existed and been used by humans for thousands of years. it was so common in the roman era it was depicted in art without comment as a typical part of daily life. the steel rubs against its face (a piece of wood actually has two but humans tend only to have one unless they are dishonest) and this is the first sign of “resurrection” — unlike trees destined for firewood or simply being eliminated for construction and set to become fill for garden beds and paths, a tree with a future life as a piece of furniture is going to be touched with steel rather than burned or shredded or boiled into paper. what was the sign of the afterlife coming that was spoken of in your religious childhood? the sound of a trumpet calling you out of a grave? this is the tree’s trumpet voluntary played on the edge of a blade.

9. and i drink in new reflections caressed by hands able to tear yet gentle

touched by a woodworker who has the ability and strength to simply tear the wood apart — and usually the tools to do it if they’re not careful or patient — the tree is treated gently and its surface is reflected in the polished steel of the plane’s blade (its “iron”). after a disastrous fall, destroying at least a part of our lives, are we given this treatment? if we are to be returned to life as a fully-functional human, it’s likely necessary. gentleness, even just for a few moments, being touched by careful hands that are strong enough to hurt and simply choose not to may be the only way to restore a human to life — to resurrect after a fall, you could say.

10. my bruises have healed and i no longer drink

the physical bruises are healed because they’re simply not a part of the tree that will be used. they are sawed or planed away. in the case of a human, those bruises may heal in time, too, especially with the help of that careful yet strong supportive force. but remember a tree can only be returned to life if it is dry. it can’t drink. in the same way, this is a cautionary tale for humans. after a fall, many turn to alcohol and other substances but recovery is only possible for someone “dry” — and the longer we allow ourselves to stay saturated by self-indulgence the longer we will remain stuck in the land between fall and resurrection.

11. though sunlight feels closer and more raw with each day

as the tree continues to dry and the sunlight is hitting it more “raw” as the day continues… in the case of a human, this is likely the case, too. with each passing day since a fall, awareness progressively becomes more and more present about what has shifted. whether this is good or bad mostly depends on plans and actions, those around them. in the case of the tree, the progression can be either hope or disaster. if the tree dries properly and remains cohesive, it will become furniture and live a long, happy life. if the drying goes wrong and the tree cracks, it will become firewood and the hope of an afterlife is shattered before it begins.

12. a welcome distraction yet i find myself returning to the hands

those who help us often become the ones we return to. in the tree’s case, day after day and joint after joint returns it to the same hands turning it into furniture. it’s distracted by the progression of moisture equilibrium approaching more and more permanently but nothing really changes the ministrations of the hands turning it into its future self. after a fall, though, a distraction is almost always what we welcome, whether it’s good or bad — like dehydration or recovery from substance use, dryness potentially signifying destruction or salvation.

13. their blade not tearing but returning me to life with each contemplative movement

in the case of the tree, the blade of the plane (and that of the chisel and saw) is the conduit to future life. in our cases as humans, we are often given the ability to recover not by the application of self-care and self-gentleness and self-forgiveness, things prescribed to us by the internet in its completely-absent, delusional wisdom, but pure force and commitment. if we want to recover, we must make a conscious decision and not allow ourselves to soften in our resolve. the blade we hold to our own lives is necessary and we are either broken more by it or restored by it — of course, it must be a logical blade of contemplation, not one of desperation or emotion or it is guaranteed to hurt us.

14. a shock yet somehow to be expected as i once again join my lost friends

the tree is shocked by the fact that it is being stripped and torn but that is the way to new life, much as we discover the path to recovery is painful yet necessary. the tree encounters its lost friends, other trees from nearby, similar, usually from the same species. a single piece of furniture is rarely made from a single tree, usually many pieces sourced from trees in a single area or several different trees — frequently growing in the same forest, though, as this is what keeps the cost down. it would be expected yet shocking for a tree to realize it is reunited with its childhood friends in the afterlife, don’t you think?

15. a trip through an unpredictable looking-glass

in “through the looking-glass”, alice is transported to a life completely different from her own but that reflects both her hopes and fears. that is often what happens to us after a disaster — a fall. we are taken to a place we deeply fear but know all too well that is at the same time shockingly different from our expectations and inherently familiar. a tree on the table with the ability to think might be shocked by the appearance of those friends it grew up with treated the same way suddenly becoming its neighbors as part of a table or box again — a reunion with the addition of glue.

16. reshaped yet unmistakable

as the tree is reshaped, it never loses its inherent “treeness”. in much the same way, we continue to be ourselves regardless of what changes we undergo to recover from our disasters.

17. perhaps destiny is more capricious than i had imagined

of course, destiny is simply an arcane idea and our futures are simply the result of our presents and the choices we and those around us make. but we insist on thinking of it as being prewritten — destined. that makes it seem unpredictable, capricious. there is an irony to having lost friends then being reunited in the afterlife. after a human disaster, we often find much the same thing, that we are brought back together with those we loved before and drifted away from. is that situational irony or simply the nature of desperation? hard to tell.

18. though it appears design may yet be intelligent in the afterlife

this is, of course, a commentary on religion. while there is no intelligence and no afterlife in human existence outside humanity, the afterlife for a tree does have a god, a designer and a logical system — the woodworker is deity in every sense for wood. yet the tree is shocked because, living in the real world, it discovered what all humans must eventually accept — nothing is “meant to be” or “decided”, only the result of previous actions, a process loosely understood as “karma” — every action is the result of others and causes new results that are beyond prediction and myriad in their components and complexity.

19. i had forgotten the joy of drinking my fill

the tree is now being finished — the application of shellac, oil or varnish to the completed project. after months, perhaps years of becoming more and more thoroughly dry, it is given a drink and encouraged to soak in as much as it can for its own protection and to make it look beautiful. after a complete lifetime of drinking constantly every day, it is shocking how quickly only a few months or years have made that past completely inaccessible. that is how shifts happen in our lives, too. what was your life like only a few years ago? what were your daily patterns? how foreign would those feel if you acted them out today? after a long time in the wilderness of self-destruction, the buddha was given a drink and rice and allowed to finally be full again, the beginning of the path to true enlightenment and happiness. jesus was rescued from the wilderness by the application of water in a desert country. returning to health is usually about consumption. even for a tree.

20. the purity of liquid flowing through my every pore

if that consumption is meant to help, though, it must be real. perhaps it’s water or oil or even just truth and compassion. in the case of a tree, it absorbs into every physical pore. in the case of humans, it infuses our awareness and mood.

21. reaching deep and darkening my impulses to echo the years i no longer count

most wood darkens with the application of finish — the deeper it penetrates, the darker the wood becomes. the darker and richer, that is. it echoes its life as the figure of its stresses and patterns and experiences comes to the surface. for a human, is that any different? the past feels more and more distant. how long has it been since you were in kindergarten? since high school? since the first time you rode a bicycle or sang in public? how many years can you remember clearly? or are they simply echoes that come out only when we are polished and indulging ourselves in the mirror?

22. whether heaven or hell i am still unsure

the tree has no way of knowing what its life will become. it is being prepared, groomed for a new existence. as are we when we try to recover from disaster, from falling. will the new life be heaven or hell? of course, this is a play on the idea of the tree being in the afterlife. is it heaven or hell? how can you tell. well, literature gives us a way but, as you will see in a moment, it’s inaccurate and unhelpful, nothing more than confusing. the future is unpredictable and attempting it is nothing short of painful and useless.

23. baking in the fire yet never smelling a single flame and suddenly
24. as if a god had been waiting for a sign within me to shift just slightly
25. lifted from the oppressive warmth and laid again on an altar for my sins

this is a reference to danté’s “divine comedy” but it’s more than just a reference — it’s a physical description of the drying process of wood. first it is put in a kiln, a hot, dry place to suck out the moisture by evaporation and dehydration then, once an internal sign has changed (measuring internal moisture in this case, quite literally a sign from inside the wood), it is suddenly taken out and again returned to the regular, unheated environment, whether outside to await use or in a shop or home to live.

the altar that appears here is one that could be used for veneration (worship and adoration) or sacrifice. the tree has no idea but the tools that surround it are probably close to the knives of ritual killing and dismemberment that were common even in the days of the bible.

26. yet after careful preparation i am not sacrificed
27. venerated and touched with love and painted with attention

the tree, much like us in such situations, expects to be destroyed. in this case, it doesn’t happen. but there is a very thin line between worship and sacrifice. it’s hard to tell where we will discover the future takes us. “painted” in this case may be literal but, for humans, it is often the application of a new personality as a mask.

28. reunited and brushed by glimpses of forests in the distance
29. where my children surely must play

with the application of a glossy coating, the tree can now reflect what surrounds it. through windows in its new home, perhaps it can even see its old forest and its children, the trees that have grown from its seeds, may still be alive, even for centuries there. for us, when we have returned to live, it is shocking how much has continued without us being aware, as if the destruction in our lives was felt as a pause for the rest of the world. but we are usually startled to realize those around us have changed, grown up, adopted new pieces in their lives that we have to reacquaint ourselves with when we return to the “land of the living”.

30. forgetting for the moment my absence in the sounds of birds playing between their fingertips

trees, of course, don’t think or remember. but a human tree child might have the same experience of a lost parent, remembering yet forgetting at times, living their life without necessarily focusing on the past every moment and returning to it from time to time to contemplate where they came from. if a tree was a human, it would hold birds in its hands every day. as humans, we do this with our hopes and dreams and loves. these distract us from the disasters that have happened to those around us, even our parents. returned to life, it may be shocking to see just how well the world has continued without us, how quickly it has smoothed its surface, no longer showing the ripples of our fall.

31. and my sacred duty is fulfilled not by knives plunged through my heart but devotion

ritual sacrifice is usually done with a knife through the heart or throat. this is startlingly close to the deep devotion of worship, learning to know the devotional object’s “heart” or “nature”. in the case of a tree, of course, this is even more physically-realistic, with the knives being not just symbols of destruction and salvation but the actual tools used to craft a new literal existence for it. “sacred duty” is a thinly-veiled reference to our task as humans to help each other. it is what was prescribed by great religious leaders and thinkers since words began to be written but that we almost constantly ignore — our duty is to serve and care for the humans surrounding us. if we focus on ourselves, we are not human, only worthless. the tree is devoting its new life to service with the help of the woodworker and their tools — a life as useful furniture. can we say the same after our falls or do we become even more self-indulgent and simply drain society and culture for our benefits, ignoring our duty to our communities?

32. aesthetic metamorphosis from rectilinear reshaping yet i remain myself losing nothing of the grain of my soul

this is a literal description of the transformation that happens as the woodworker turns the tree into furniture — shaping from organic curves to rectangular joinery and finished products with straight lines and clean edges. this reminds us of the line earlier in the poem, though, that no matter how much changes the “grain” or depth of self within the tree (or the human) doesn’t change. we are ourselves even after disaster as long as we continue to bounce back and live. grain, here, is a play on words as it is the pattern in the tree and the allegorical reference to the rhythm of our thoughts.

33. uncountable years twist my dreams from memory

we are shifted far into the future, likely hundreds of years as the tree reflects on its new life as furniture and what it’s experienced in this last segment. the years become uncountable over time as tends to happen in life. our memory fades and we only remember a few details from the past — often only a few from the present, too. the wood, though, does more than just forget. like an aging human, aging wood, warped by time, literally twists. dreams are harder to sustain as sleep becomes difficult.

34. yet with each moment i drink more sunlight against my face and smile more deeply
35. skin shimmering more with age despite what the young would have us believe
36. perhaps only the effect of careful preparation

young people tell us youth is valuable — it’s like the person with diamonds extolling the virtues of a diamond ring, rather more self-servingly than we should believe yet, as humans, we are often taken in by this silliness — our whole culture values diamonds and gold despite them having no real functional value in the way we use them. as the boards warp, they smile and frown more — twisting with time. the more sunlight that hits them, the more they move, much as happens to our faces as we spend more of our lives wrinkling in the sunlight of our daily existences, each new fall teaching us to smile or cry more and more. remember, the surface of a board is called its “face” so the reference isn’t just theoretical but literal. the careful preparation of finishing protects the furniture but our “careful preparation” has prepared us, too. what our parents and teachers taught us has meant the sunlight passing (days and years of life) have left their marks but we continue to live.

37. though that altar is so long ago i feel its touch only with the most tacit of feathery thoughts
38. though no fire came for my burned heart
39. and i was given new life in the sun

how strong are our memories? this is a reflection of what has happened. a “life in the sun” is a new chance at happiness. there is always that option, of course. but can we grab it? will we be given it by someone strong and careful like this tree was?

40. listening carefully to the voices surrounding me
41. unguarded as if i couldn’t hear

a piece of furniture that’s lived for centuries would be fascinating to talk to, the fights and loves and discussions it’s heard. we talk as if nobody can hear us. usually nobody can. but what was so important about those strong words?

41. and in this instant i relive that falling day
42. when i thought myself pulled down to hell
43. and shiver

memory of dark times and falls never really leaves us, even if it is dulled by time.

44. knowing no more of the afterlife now than all those moons ago

the afterlife isn’t real. but the future is. in its reality, though, even for a tree now become a piece of furniture, tomorrow is unknowable. we can’t predict it. will it be cherished for another century or broken into pieces and burned in the morning because it is no longer desired? will we be happy tomorrow or torn apart again with a new, unexpected fall?

having come to the end of the story, we must then look at the deeper meanings, though these are often far less significant than the story. here are a few meanings that can be taken but you are welcome to find some of your own.

1. what we think of as disaster is often an opportunity for a new life in a completely new way if only we embrace it rather than fighting.
2. the afterlife is an unpredictable result of failure but it is inevitable so whether it’s bad or good there’s no reason to try to avoid it as it’s impossible and no more than a waste of effort when we could be using that time to try to adapt.
3. beauty comes with time and is not dependent on never having failed or fallen, only from how we recover and the help we manage to find.
4. we can be rebuilt in new ways but only when we accept the old forms are gone forever.
5. we never lose our inherent selves, though we waste incredible effort and time trying to preserve the authenticity that is going to be there anyway without us needing to think about it, no matter how much we change — we’ll still be the tree even if we become the table.

i hope you have enjoyed waking through the life of a tree and the fall of a human with me today. perhaps this will be useful the next time you look at a poem for the first time — or for the hundredth. there are many right answers. many things a poem can tell you. don’t let anyone tell you there’s only one. there are many things that don’t make sense, of course. it’s not that there are no wrong interpretations. but to be correct it must only be internally-consistent — the author doesn’t get to decide what’s right. your teachers don’t, either. if it makes sense, it is valid. so stop being afraid of poetry and drink in its beauty. at least, drink in its beauty where you find it. don’t force yourself to read poetry you don’t like. or anything you don’t like, for that matter. life is too short and there are far too many books out there to suffer through ones you don’t enjoy. there are ones out there you’ll derive great pleasure from. look for them. i promise they’ll come if you try. thanks so much for your eyes and thoughts today. may the peace of the forest wrap you in its birdsong and sweet blossoms.

[estimated reading time 6 minutes]

we’re in the middle of october and it’s fall. it’s miserable and dark and the nights are closing in on us. it’s time to huddle under a blanket and turn up the heat, grab a cup of hot tea and snuggle with your favorite book.

or you could just say fuck the depression and create something.

yes. let’s do that. and let’s do it together because there’s no reason we shouldn’t. we can encourage each other. so here’s the deal. write a thousand words every day. at least that. i mean, if you want to write ten-thousand, go for it. respond to the prompt and post it somewhere — anywhere. start a free blog on wordpress if you like. or something more serious. or use your existing blog. but, whatever it is, make it public. because there’s no point in writing if you’re not going to have an audience. that’s what we write for. and you’re never going to get better if you don’t have an audience in mind, anyway.

it doesn’t matter if you start today or tomorrow or next week. just start when you’re ready. but don’t stop. thirty-two days of writing will train your mind to look at itself and say “you’re not up for writing — and i don’t give a flying assfuck so we’re doing it anyway”. and once you have a month of pushing yourself to achieve you won’t find it so weird anymore. i promise. i force myself to write every day. every. damned. day. whether it’s good or not. if it’s good, i share it. if it’s not, i scrap it. but i write. you know what they say about practice, right?

it makes you perfect. or it makes you crazy. usually both. aim for perfect. crazy’s not all it’s cracked up to be.

why thirty-two? because it’s more than a month. whatever month. and it’s a great number. it’s two multiplied by itself five times. it’s also a great number in binary. 100000. so that’s pretty awesome. whatever, though. if you do thirty-two days, you’ll have created the habit and that’s what matters.

one other thing. write these stream-of-consciousness. you don’t need to plan or prepare. write your thoughts. as they come. step outside your comfort zone and just go back and check for grammar and spelling later. this isn’t a polished piece. it’s just an exercise. so stretch your fingers and your mind and join me, ok?

here are your prompts. these are not questions. they are meant to get you started. you don’t have to feel restricted by them.

1. after thirty days of life, i have become used to the world. they think of me as an infant but i have learned so much. how can i share that before it’s too late?
2. sometimes i am ashamed of the music i listened to as a teen but it’s so fundamental to my soul and when one of those songs comes on i’m immediately taken back to a time and place.
3. i feel like i should know so much more about my great-grandparents but, despite being separated from their lives by only a century, their daily experiences are so foreign to me.
4. i am a contemporary person, unwilling to sacrifice my freedom and control of my decisions except when i let society dictate my actions and expectations tell me what i should want. oh. wait a second. i’m not free at all.
5. i am overwhelmed by the memory this single bite has filled me with as taste stimulates me to be back in that place.
6. what would i kill for? principle? to save my mother? perhaps keep a child safe?
7. we have all experienced isolation but i am seriously considering borrowing a cabin on a lake where i can get monthly grocery deliveries but live there totally alone for the next year. i can’t tell if it will be amazing or torture but i expect it will be one or the other.
8. why is this my favorite color? there has to be a story. even if it’s just one i made up to justify it.
9. before written language, everything was open to being forgotten. even things we are desperate to remember — how can i make sure i don’t lose my past? or that my children don’t gradually forget i ever existed?
10. what is the one thing i wish i could predict, given the opportunity to know the future but only in a single detail?
11. i am walking to work and suddenly a girl runs past wearing a red hood carrying a basket. she turns to look at me and asks if i know where her grandmother’s house is. i stare confusedly at her but realize i am suddenly in a forest and there is a house in the distance. i point and she runs off in that direction.
12. i have suddenly lost my vision but nobody around me knows. is it temporary? permanent? should i tell them? what will happen when i’m not just incapable of seeing but known by others to be?
13. i hear an explosion in the distance followed by gunshots. i can’t see anything but i feel paralyzed. do i run to help or escape?
14. every child has a comfort-object. a blanket or stuffed-toy, perhaps. but every adult has one, too. how did mine become so important? if i could choose again, what would it be? could i honestly live without one?
15. a dog runs up to me on the road and starts tugging at my sleeve. it obviously wants me to follow it.
16. i no longer need to sleep. i am healthy and rested every day with twenty-four hours of productivity without exhaustion or breaks. i can’t tell if this is good or just the source of even more boredom.
17. i have become the animal i most identify with. it may be temporary or forever. what matters in my life? what’s my experience today? how do i feel?
18. i look up at the water pouring from the shower-head and my head starts spinning. i know i’m going to faint here in the shower.
19. i will never have children. it’s impossible.
20. i can’t feel my feet. i know they’re there. i can see them. they still move perfectly fine. but i’m losing the ability to feel my whole body, piece by piece.
21. my country has suddenly been attacked and i am being drafted. i have one chance to escape before they come for me and i become a soldier in a war i desperately want to avoid but if i run i will never be able to come back — a deserter both to the government and my friends and neighbors.
22. i suddenly smell and tastes hot chocolate and realize i’m drinking it and it shocks me out of my dreams back to the present i was trying to ignore.
23. i see someone in the distance beating a child with a stick. i run in their direction…
24. i wake up in the morning, face covered in tears, body aching from physical exertion but i remember nothing of the past, not even my name or where i am.
25. the radio has just announced the significant possibility of an asteroid collision large enough to trigger a new mass-extinction event. it will be a month from now. it’s unlikely i will be able to escape the planet and the plans to divert it sound unfeasible. i will, along with everyone else i know and love, die in thirty days.
26. i am walking at sunset in the forest and i hear the sound of a wolf howling in the distance.
27. my sister has just called me. the conversation began with “are you sitting down? i just got home from the hospital…” and the shock is beginning to fade as i face the news.
28. i hold a single white rose in my hand.
29. a photograph of me with no clothes on flashes on the screen, though you can’t see my face in the picture. i know it’s me. this isn’t a text, though. it’s a news article.
30. i look outside and it is dark. not just night but completely dark. there is no electricity. but there’s no storm, no explosion, no obvious reason. i try my phone and it doesn’t respond. power has simply disappeared from my world.
31. i’m not sure if this is cheating.
32. i see a bright light and realize i am about to discover the answer to the most fundamental question of life — what happens when it ends?

of course, you may want something far more typical. if on any day you don’t feel up to responding to the prompt, here are some alternative questions…

1. what name would you choose for yourself if you could simply erase yours?
2. what’s your second-worst mistake?
3. who could you never stop loving?
4. were you ever innocent?
5. what’s the movie that spoke to you most deeply?
6. what would having far more money let you change in your life?
7. is there anything in life like learning to ride a bike — once you learn it, you remember it forever — even literally riding a bike?
8. what did your grandparents dream of for your future?
9. could you survive on the streets?
10. are you kind?
11. can you ever completely forget the past?
12. what would you do if you couldn’t remember how to read or write?
13. is there an animal whose life you’d willingly adopt?
14. what’s the best smell in the world?
15. is childhood valuable?
16. what object would you risk your life to save from a fire?
17. what’s the best book you’ve ever read?
18. is there a fear that controls your life? limits you every day?
19. have you ever walked through the woods barefoot?
20. “life is nothing more than acting for new audiences all the time” — what do you think?
21. do you care who leads the country?
22. is prejudice ever justified?
23. what would be your ideal job?
24. are you ticklish?
25. is it important to be comfortable? feel pleasure? peace? harmony? respect?
26. do you ever regret following the rules?
27. what is the first memory you have of the ocean?
28. are you afraid to die?
29. is altruism possible? desirable?
30. who do you want to hold you when you’re sad?
31. do you ever feel like an impostor?
32. what if you couldn’t remember anything about your life — even your own name — and you were lost? what would you do? could you trust anyone?

there you have it. now it’s up to you. start writing.

of course, i would love to see the results of this writing challenge. creativity is very important to me and i’m obsessed with spending my life encouraging others to create more — with words, wood, whatever. if you want me to read your writing, feel free to email me a link to where you post it and i’ll take a look.

good luck. may the force be with you. blessed be.

[estimated reading time 18 minutes]

there is a problem with modern education. it is neither modern nor does it educate. this, indeed, is an issue for our society. we are creating a future where we can’t possibly do anything but regress to the darkness of our medieval, brutal past because we aren’t just forgetting the lessons it once taught us but wallowing in a present-focused lethargy where we simply ignore even the most basic plan to prepare for the future. we are collectively in denial about what has happened to cause our present or that our future is being determined by our actions in this moment.

there is a scene in disney’s “the lion king” where rafiki hits simba in the head with a stick and, when simba complains, says “it doesn’t matter — it’s in the past”. simba replies “but it still hurts”. while movies can often teach us important lessons, not just as children but significant for our whole lives, this may be the most fundamental one. i remember seeing that and thinking “that’s so very true — i wonder if kids will get that”. now i don’t wonder. the kids might. the adults certainly don’t.

how does the educational model work?

the general school system was based on the daily needs of the agrarian revolution. i’m not speaking of the american model of education in particular but that is an excellent example of this system at work.

while some educational systems (like those in china, korea, japan and vietnam) were originally created to educate a high-level thinking class, these systems have been completely replaced by a “modern”, american-type school system, at least at the grade-school level.

in most countries, especially in the west, education was disparate and rare before the nineteenth century and its adoption had very little to do with understanding or even knowledge. it was the impact of two significant changes in society — the industrialization of production and the increase in non-residential work. let’s take a look at these two separately but remember they work together.

in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the west (and to some degree the east), the industrial revolution occurred. what this meant was the rise of specialization. people had to have specific knowledge about a particular type of work in a way that simply wasn’t generalizable in the past. yes, a clockmaker had to spend many years apprenticing with gears and pendulums and a baker had a deep understanding of yeast and flour but most people were what we would now loosely term “homesteaders” — jacks of all trades, living separate from their neighbors and mostly self-sufficient. they lived mostly in rural locations, physically-isolated and requiring a moderate degree of functionality in many different disciplines. if something at home or outside became damaged, they had to fix it. it didn’t have to be perfect but it had to work. cooking and cleaning had to be done. childcare, education, healthcare and recreation were all personal responsibilities with little or no help from outside. with the urbanization and centralization of the industrial revolution, for the majority of people this suddenly shifted.

people came to cities to live much closer and instead of spending their days doing many different tasks do a single task repeatedly. the assembly-line or specialized-repetitive model of labor was more efficient, especially for large-scale production. but it meant general ability was no longer necessary (and, as a result, no longer prized or looked for), replaced almost instantly with highly-specialized knowledge of how to complete specific tasks and an absence of even basic understanding of others. this created a society of completely-uneducated workers who were capable of a single action performed perfectly and nothing else. it turned humans into single-task machines working for the profit of their companies or governments — a state that has shifted only a little today.

while a completely-uneducated population caused little difficulty for the companies, governments began to realize there were significant problems — a better-educated population would work more efficiently and produce more profit, lose less time at work from avoidable illness and feel a stronger sense of duty because of the high level of indoctrination standardized education can exert at a young age.

remember, these were people who had historically gotten a practical education from their parents, grandparents and neighbors in a wide variety of general topics from agriculture to carpentry and biology to cooking. this knowledge was now completely absent from their lives and they were living in nothing short of poverty and squalor in most cases as a result. life didn’t get better in the industrial period. it got dramatically worse. the rise in things like running water that we now think of as necessary for life to improve came at a time when society was shifting to a model that treated humans as expendable physical labor for profit and their impacts weren’t really felt for decades — in some cases, centuries.

standardized, general education was introduced (slowly) in this period in various countries but the impact was mostly the same because the purpose was the same — to produce workers capable of quickly learning highly-specialized tasks while possessing enough general knowledge about the world and human existence to take care of themselves and be efficient members of the new urban, for-profit society. this was a revolution in “education” and it is where our current school systems come from.

the increase in non-residential work was an obvious side-effect of industrialization. from a model of “cottage-industry” and local farming, generalized around the world in the preindustrial era, different areas began at different times to shift to centralized production facilities. it was no longer efficient to have a person sit at home with a loom weaving or an individual metalworker with a small forge and hammers. the loom became the weaving-factory, powered by massive steam plants and vast areas of belts and gears. the blacksmith’s forge became the steelworks where furnaces bigger than houses melted ore day and night and turned the bodies of their workers black from the heat and dirt.

so workers no longer took the raw materials home and used productive tools to create finished items for exchange or sale. they took themselves to the tools, housed in factories and government facilities — the materials didn’t move, only the workers. this “going to work” model has become so normalized in our modern society, even a global pandemic lasting multiple years did little to shift it from being the accepted way work happens. only two or three hundred years ago, though, this was such a rarity anyone who “went to work” was seen as unusual and most people in society didn’t understand how they could possibly live a fulfilling life that far from the comfort and community of home. time has shifted far more quickly and this onsite work is dramatically less-traditional than most people often imagine.

with a still-high birthrate, however, this left a significant issue. the rise of onsite work meant children were a much larger task to be completed at home, where people spent much less time. while women were generally expected to take care of their children, as had always been the case through history, especially in the west, that doesn’t tell the whole story. this was the case for young children but, as children became older, men took larger roles in their education because the children did more and more tasks to help at home, especially in farming settings. added to that, older children took care of younger children, regardless of gender. with the rise of onsite work, however, anyone old enough to go to work was no longer present at home to either take care of or educate children and the workload was dramatically increased on the few whose jobs were at least partially childcare — typically mothers. while this job was traditionally shared, it was certainly no longer possible simply because nobody else was there to share it. the stay-at-home-mother is not a traditional situation in any society — it is a result of the industrial revolution. mother-childcare is a traditional myth, not the reality of how families worked before factories and urbanization shifted societal norms.

schools were therefore created not simply to indoctrinate and provide a workforce. they ensured families were able to send their children somewhere so a single mother could complete all the expected tasks of cooking, cleaning and general home-maintenance without a large group of children at home to take care of and educate — only the very young spent time at home and, in many places, once they left for school might only return home for short visits, living at the schools. in most countries, children returned home in the evening but left in the morning for more schooling and this kept the children busy — the education was not particularly valuable to the children but it was incredibly-important to the structure of a family that would have collapsed with workload if childcare was a constant task.

there was the interesting side-effect of local-exceptionality and nationalist indoctrination in these schools. schools were mostly run by churches and governments — a combination in many places but sometimes one or the other, though there was practically little difference between them or their approaches. schools didn’t just create loyal, committed workers but obsessive nationalists devoted to national-service and willing to sacrifice their lives and families to fight and think of their own cultures and countries as superior to others’. the school system isn’t only to blame for its indoctrination of specialization and enforced-lack-of-understanding but the rise of nationalist hatred, racism, belligerence (at both individual and international levels) and war. war happened before schools were readily-available. society-wide, mechanized war was only possible in an age of generalized education.

while this is significant as a historical background, however, we are more interested in what schools do today. the problem, as is rather clear on inspection, is that very little has changed either in model or approach from the industrial era to the contemporary age. we still run our schools based on an informational model.

the informational model can also be called the “blank-slate” or “teaching-learning” model. this is the idea that students come with a need to learn and must be given information. not that they must understand the information, only that they be prepared to share that information on request and perform specific tasks. this is very different from the previous model — the apprenticeship model.

in an apprenticeship model, information transfer is limited. a master demonstrates and assigns physical or thought tasks to allow students to understand why and how a process is done to be able to replicate it. why is this model so different? because it must be self-sustaining. in an apprenticeship system, the apprentice becomes a master over time, eventually creating a new instantiation of an apprentice. it’s a cycle. every student is educated with the knowledge of how to do, why to do and how to teach the next generation. in the informational model, the vast majority of students are never expected to do more than use the information and skills so the “why” and especially the “how to teach” are seen as unnecessary and learning is simply a question of pouring facts and basic functional competencies into the waiting minds and bodies of students.

while educational theorists have disputed the “blank-slate” model of education, saying students function better if they are treated as comprehending participants in their educations, this doesn’t change the basic premise of a division between “student who must learn facts and skills” and “teacher who must share them”. the process has in many schools and times become more participatory and collaborative but there is still this sharp division, compared to the previous model where there was an expected progression of student eventually becoming teacher through experience and mastery.

what’s wrong with an informational model?

the problem with the information model (and why i am calling it the “informational” model here as opposed to the “teaching-learning” model) is that it focuses on information (as the name suggests) and specific tasks or skills. it is not about understanding the world, only living in it in an acceptable and functional way with enough knowledge to exist and complete required tasks — rarely more.

what this does is create a society where there is a small number of people that understands but an overwhelming majority that only knows. and knowledge in this sense is a problem because it’s not coming from thorough understanding of a topic. it’s coming from trust. how do you “know” gravity in the informational model? you memorize its existence. you can intuit it from the world around you but what’s important is believing it’s real. this is no different from being told of the existence of a deity and a moral and societal requirement to show up at church on a weekly basis to venerate and adore them. we have a school system (largely implemented by churches) that approximates the belief-based system of doctrinal education. you don’t have to know why 5+5=10, just be able to do it — and do it as quickly as possible.

why is this a problem? two reasons — speed of societal change and indoctrination.

our world changes quickly. without a basic, fundamental understanding of how the world works around us, we are paralyzed by large-scale change. if this doesn’t seem immediately-apparent, it is because you are used to it and believe it is a necessary part of the human cultural experience. it is not. it is a result of a failed education system. let’s take a look at an example.

let’s say you’re sixteen. you spend your life functioning with a phone. you know it intimately through experience. there is nothing you can possibly imagine that you can’t do with the thing and your parents don’t have a clue how to use it. you’re constantly laughing at your father for slow typing and not understanding the latest apps. when you visit your grandparents, they are so detached from it they are using technology years out of date and can only just barely manage to reply to your messages — not in seconds like your friends but in hours or days. you think of them as so far from your skill-level and that it’s quaint, traditional and perhaps even cute. but why are they incapable? it’s not because you’re smarter. and it’s not because you went to school to learn how to use your phone. it’s because you grew up learning to use it not through basic experience but understanding. you learned how a cloud service worked, how application-distribution networks functioned, when and why keyboards appeared and disappeared onscreen, what app was used for what purpose and why one thing was better than another. if it was simply a matter of experiential learning, the next shift in technology — for example the general shift that happened from microblogging (like twitter) to shared-experience social-media (like facebook) to a cultural obsession with short-video interactive-media (like tiktok) would have been difficult for you. but you adapted immediately because this isn’t just a system you learned — it’s a system you understood. if, however, you are comfortable with the information in your school-derived knowledge-system — for example, measurement — you can use it like it’s part of your inherent natural capacity but any shift completely destroys your competence. imagine replacing your system of measurement with a new one. instead of meters and grams, we will now use distances measured related to temperature gradients — a logarithmic distance scale — and mass will be measured as an exponential function of gravity. these are no less practical ways to measure distance and mass than meters and grams but this shift would be nearly-impossible for you. shifting measurement systems five-hundred years ago, however, would have been annoying (like shifting social-media platforms) but accepted and easy by your ancestors even three-hundred years ago. and these measurement-system changes happened regularly in history — the only one that has ever really been an issue for society is the shift that happened in the industrial age. when industrialized countries changed from traditional measurement-systems to metric, there was a brutal backlash from the population and many still have difficulty adapting — even after generations. in countries where industrialization hadn’t yet happened (china, japan, etc), this shift occurred without question and adaptation happened immediately.

the other problem with the model is indoctrination. what occurs in a system where information is provided is that the information can be right or wrong. understanding can be misleading or misled but it’s never completely right or wrong and can fluidly adapt as more experience is available. with information, however, there is an absolute quality to it — a belief-structure. if you have been told all your life that 5+5=9 and suddenly discover it’s actually 10, this is a problem. if you understand how addition as a concept works, the fact that it is 10 is irrelevant and not in any way interesting to you. if you truly understand how something works, memorizing the results is unnecessary and meaningless. what matter is the system, the process and how it fits with reality, not the specific facts.

how does this really apply in life? nobody is being taught 5+5=9, of course. but they are being taught many things about the world. let’s take a simple example that clearly demonstrates this indoctrination problem between the united kingdom and south korea — the same difference exists between the united states and china or france and japan but it’s helpful to pick countries that are more similar in size and population to see the absolute effect. during the novel-coronavirus pandemic, the united kingdom’s response was ridiculous while south korea’s was logical. in both countries, however, it was generally-accepted and understood as necessary. how did that actually occur? it’s a result of educational models based in indoctrination.

if you have spent your entire life being taught personal-freedom is more important than personal-responsibility, a common theme in western classrooms, it is completely reasonable to accept a government response that says “it’s ok if others get sick as long as your daily life is not inconvenienced in any way”. in a society where personal-responsibility and duty to the community is a coherent and constant theme in the education system, such a response would be unthinkable and something closer to “it is your absolute moral duty to keep those around you safe regardless of what that involves as long as you are capable” is expected. this example demonstrates two other things. the informational model is not simply present in the west — the south-korean, japanese, chinese and indian school systems are firmly-rooted in this concept much the same as american, canadian, british and french systems. additionally, the indoctrination doesn’t necessarily mean bad or incorrect information is shared. in this case, a good response is created through indoctrination. what is obvious, however, is that you can condition the population in favor of a particular type of future using this approach and predict it with little error — the informational approach to education is, practically-speaking, nothing more than long-term behavioral-programming from childhood to late-adolescence, often early-adulthood.

what’s a better model?

a better model is what i call “awareness-creativity-engagement” or “ace”. this is a three-stage system where information is not seen as either necessity or goal. it assumes the availability of information and that possessing it is largely irrelevant to daily experience — it focuses on situational understanding, changing and reacting to that situation and being present in the moment to determine the path for the future.

it’s important to think of this as a multistage system where the stages are simultaneous rather than consecutive. it’s not that a child begins by developing awareness then becomes creative, later engaged. these three things happen as cycles constantly throughout the educational process. it is a way of thinking and teaching, not a development strategy for a child becoming an adult.

let’s look at a very simple example of how this would work. this example is linear — awareness to creativity to engagement — but that doesn’t signify that the entire process is that way. individual teaching takes these stages as steps on a path but the engagement stage of one concept can easily lead to the awareness or creativity stage of another. education is a holistic reality, not a single path like in an indoctrination model.

let’s say you want a student to understand what water is — a typical basic-chemistry concept. it is, of course, two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen bonded as a stable molecule, repeated to form pure water (if you don’t know what all these things mean, it is not that i have become highly-technical but that your education has let you down — these are extremely foundational concepts and it doesn’t matter what you do in your life — you truly should understand them and they are basic and easily-understood).

the awareness step could simply take the form of diagrams and atomic-level images of water. but it should include instruction on the entire atomic structure. not as a memorization exercise but teaching the history of how it was discovered and the current state — atoms, of course, are not indivisible and are made of many subatomic particles. we simply find it useful to look at atoms and molecules because they’re human-scale things that function in our world. being aware of a thing isn’t just knowledge about it — it is knowledge about why it must be that way. the student needs to understand how the structure forms, why atoms are stable, how they come together, how molecules are formed and why two hydrogens and one oxygen work well together but two oxygens and a hydrogen would be hydroperoxyl, vastly less-common and in many ways destructive as a chemical — why is it dramatically rarer than water? what’s the effective difference? this all comes as part of awareness of water’s structure. there is more to it than that but i suspect you get the idea of this step.

this step doesn’t have to be completed to move to the next — they overlap while being somewhat-linear in process. without awareness, creativity isn’t really possible. creativity is where situational-understanding becomes useful-understanding. the student goes from knowing how something works and why that is the case, from experience and exploration, to practical application of the knowledge. in the case of water structure, this could involve experiments showing how water is purified from other substances and how it can be separated into hydrogen and oxygen. it can extend beyond those basic experiments, however. the student would be encouraged to take the knowledge of the structure and see what its implications are for their daily life — what does that mean for their neighborhood, for example? while the structure of water may seem distant and unrelated, it truly is not. a creative student may look at how waste-water is treated and how far it must travel, the reasons gray-waste and more toxic forms are kept separate, explore better ways to treat water and preserve the distinction between salt and fresh sources of water to avoid the difficulty of desalination. creativity is about engaging the understanding that came in the previous step and turning it into an applied interaction with daily life — understanding something is useless if you can’t put it into practice. a model of education focused on information ignores the next step — understanding. an understanding-focused model without creativity simply cuts off the process at a later step.

in the engagement step, this applicability becomes less theoretical and the student would be encouraged to actually go into the world and relate their creative thoughts to those of others — environmental groups or industry, for example, in the case of water. there is no point if the student gets an understanding of water’s molecular structure, develops thoughts about how this impacts their daily life then doesn’t communicate with those in the real-world trying to ensure better water-quality and environmental protections in their neighborhood. this means the school is far more connected with its generalized environment — each new understanding comes with a relationship between student and world or at least between student and community.

this model takes information as a basic commodity that is not memorized or even learned. it uses information as fuel for understanding, takes that understanding and applies it with creative questions and solutions then takes those and applies them to the real-world, three processes that are distinctly-lacking in the current school approach — not just in the west but globally.

what subjects are included in an awareness-creativity-engagement (ace) model?

the notion of “subject” is problematic because there is vast overlap but this specialization is truly necessary to ensure expert instruction and unavoidable in the practice of education — a math teacher should know a significant amount about english literature but doesn’t necessarily have to be an expert while the literature teacher should understand organic chemistry at a coherent and basic level but knowing the details well-enough to teach complete classes is unnecessary. this division of educational labor is the only way a system like this can operate.

the result would be a system loosely divided as subjects but these would no longer be structured as independently-graded classes. they would work together and projects would be supervised by more than one teacher at a time, spanning multiple disciplines. instruction would happen in a divided manner but evaluation would be collective and the awareness would simply be shared across all potential sources of information.

the basic structure would be to have…

• hard science
  • math
  • physics/astronomy/meteorology
  • chemistry
  • biology
  • geology
  • biochemistry/immunology
  • engineering/robotics
• social science
  • psychology
  • anatomy/health
  • sociology/anthropology
  • geography/culture
• humanities
  • language/creative-writing
  • literature/translation
  • history/politics
  • philosophy
  • media studies
• practicality
  • language-learning
  • technology/coding
  • woodworking/metalworking
  • cooking
  • agriculture
  • physical-exercise
  • music/fine-arts/performing-arts
  • finance/practical-economics

while this looks like a large group of subjects compared to what is taught in a typical contemporary school, many of these would be grouped. they are all important for the development of a young learner’s mind.

in a structure where students are expected to attend school from 8-5, for example, divided in hour-long classes with an hour of break throughout the day for eating, this would allow 56 class blocks. for a sixteen-year-old, it might look like this. (combined courses wouldn’t necessarily mean every day had all components, just that topics would vary and a single instructor could be expected to teach anything in that block.)

• 7 blocks math
• 4 blocks physics-astronomy-meteorology-geology
• 4 blocks chemistry-biology-biochemistry-immunology
• 3 blocks engineering-robotics
• 3 blocks psychology
• 3 blocks anatomy-health
• 5 blocks sociology-anthropology-geography-culture
• 5 blocks language-creative-writing
• 3 blocks literature-translation-media-studies
• 4 blocks history-politics-philosophy
• 5 blocks language-learning
• 2 blocks technology-coding
• 1 block woodworking-metalworking
• 1 block cooking-agriculture
• 2 blocks physical-exercise
• 3 blocks music-fine-arts-performing-arts
• 1 block finance-practical-economics

students would, of course, be expected to do extracurricular activities and these would probably be much the same as those are today — related to one or more subjects from the regular day like playing sports, singing in choirs, playing in bands, studying and practicing languages, exploring diverse cultures through their cinema and cuisine and participating in local government, among many other activities, whatever students find interesting. these should be focused on practical relationships with the real-world, however — what use is activity if not beneficial to the general society the school is part of. a choir can perform in public to improve the lives of others. a robotics club can contribute to ongoing research. a language club can go into the community and engage with native-speakers to improve cultural awareness. emphasizing the basic human duty to improve the community and society as a whole is an important part of the ace model.

how does the ace model align with current school division?

while there is nothing particularly useful about the way current schools are divided — primary, elementary, junior-secondary, senior-secondary, undergraduate, graduate, postgraduate — there is no reason the current age-type divisions couldn’t be expanded to reflect the function of an ace model.

students would begin at approximately 2 in a primary-school that would continue to age 6 (levels 1-4) followed by levels 5-8 in an elementary-school, getting to age 10. the next four years (levels 9-12, ages 10/11-13/14) would be a middle-school followed by a four-hear high-school (levels 13-16, ages 14/15-17/18), allowing the same school-leaving-age as is currently common. there is no particular reason for this division but it is already so well-integrated in our society it would be easier to adopt it and gradually shift. students should be permitted to move freely between levels and mix-and-match levels in different disciplines as ability and interest vary, as opposed to the rigid age-grade system currently in place. over time, the year divisions would gradually break down and students would no longer be grouped by age but this is a generation-long change that would be prohibitive to propose in the first step and it is, practically-speaking, not inherent to the model’s success.

is anything like this being implemented?

no. there is nothing like this being implemented anywhere in a school-system. perhaps more surprising is that there is no undergraduate or graduate/postgraduate program doing this. we live in a world where information is everywhere and understanding is vital but we still have even universities focused solely on teaching and testing knowledge rather than application of that knowledge in most cases and very rarely specifically teaching creativity and real-world application. industrial models, particularly those in technology, are far closer — google’s flexible-education model, for example, at least embraces the first stage of an ace-style system.

does this model work at the postsecondary level?

yes. there is no reason postsecondary education couldn’t function using this model. the shift would be easier in that context because universities are already, at least in theory, equipped to deal with deeper understanding rather than simply transmitting and testing information. practically, the shift would be as fundamental for them as standard schools. the level of complexity at college and beyond, however, would make the benefits even more significant and the instructors at that level are likely better-prepared to deal with both creative application and real-world engagement segments of the model.

what is the implication for academia and industry of implementing an ace model?

academia has always been a vacuum — a self-perpetuating and self-regulating system. this means its views tend to be conservative and insular. shifting to an ace model would mean it has no choice but to become liberal in its approaches as students require up-to-the-moment interaction with the world around them rather than a theoretical model stuck in the past — reading shakespeare and trying to apply it to daily life, for example, rather than contemporary fiction or working with outdated models of learning-styles-based education or religious nonsense as a foundation for scientific or ethical practice. the benefit is obvious.

industry stands to gain even more from this model shift — a higher level of understanding in its workers means far less on-the-job training and experiential learning, leading to more efficiency and a workforce more engaged.

the other side-effect, though, might not be as comfortable for industry. the ace model implies cultural, environmental and interpersonal connectedness, something industry has often tried very hard to avoid — it is common for industry to act in ways that are destructive or unethical. a workforce unwilling to engage in these practices could be damaging to profit, though beneficial to the community and society in general.

final thoughts

shifting from a model of education where “knowing things” is important and the end-goal to one where knowledge is just the input for the first stage and understanding gives way to creativity leading to real-world engagement is a necessary step in the direction of progress. will this happen? it’s impossible to tell. if it doesn’t however, we will see a continuation of the trend we currently see — obsessive self-focus, lethargy, laziness, lack of cultural connectivity, lack of education and awareness of the world, disinterest and a population simply living for pleasure in the moment. this is no way for humans to live. it is, however, our reality in this moment. does the future hold something better? it certainly does if we choose to act. if we don’t, we’re as fucked as our schools. thanks for taking the time to think about this with me today!

[estimated reading time 9 minutes]

let’s build a smoothing-plane. this smoothing-plane, in fact…

there are many, many, many ways to do this but i believe this is the simplest. a few things before we begin. this is a plane design based on a traditional smoothing-plane but it’s longer than is typical of a western plane for extra stability and the iron is much closer to the tail to, again, increase stability when planing. it can be used either push or pull-style without modifying the design in any way.

it’s made to take a standard stanley 4 iron and chip-breaker with its thumb-screw. if you’re building it with a different iron or chip-breaker, you’ll have to shift the dimensions to compensate but i have specifically done it with this one because it’s so easy to find and many beginners will be able to pick one up for a few dollars at a flea-market – all you need is a dead old plane to grab the parts from and, if the plane is dead, anyway, you might get that for less than five bucks. if you go to ebay, you’ll be able to find the pair for about $10/15 pretty-much anywhere in the world and, assuming you have a few small scraps of hardwood, that’s the total cost for the project.

what to build it from is a matter of intense discussion, debate and hate in the woodworking community. the simple answer is that you can build a plane from any wood. the complicated answer is that you shouldn’t build it from anything soft but you can certainly do it – the plane just won’t last very long before it starts to cause problems and you’ll need to make a new one. but if you’re just starting out that might not be a bad thing because it’s cheap and gives you extra practice.

i suggest a dense hardwood like hard-maple. you can certainly use something relatively-hard and solid like white-oak, beech, ash, cherry or walnut but remember this is a tool and the harder the wood the longer it will last and the better it will perform for you. if you build it from pine, you’re unlikely to be very happy. if you build it from an expensive, ultra-hard wood, it will probably work well but it won’t really be notably different from just using hard-maple so it might not be worth the money. it’s your plane, though, and i’ve built a few from really nice offcuts simply because they look beautiful and it’s a joy to have a jarrah or spotted-gum plane in the shop – both work really well but they’re not much different from all the maple ones i use more regularly.

let’s talk about length and purpose. this is a smoothing-plane. if you regularly smooth very small or large pieces, you might want a slightly shorter or longer plane but this should be good for general use. if you’re looking for a jack or jointer, you might want something a lot larger (especially for the second). if you’re going to change the length, i suggest changing the toe more than the heel – the longer leading-edge will help stabilize the plane. the same design will work for much longer planes but you may also want a wider iron (60-70mm) for serious jointing.

what’s a smoothing-plane for? well, you start with a jack or fore and get the board approximately flat and level. then you use a jointer to make it really flat and level. with those two operations done, the smoother will make the surface gentle to touch and ready for finish. it’s the third plane but that doesn’t mean it’s any less-important than the other two. the jack/fore can be very approximate. it doesn’t have to be well-made or setup. the jointer does need to be more accurate but the smoother is the one that gives the wood its final shape and texture so it should be as close to perfect as you can manage. so if you’re going to get a cheap jack and use it for both the fore and jointing at first, this is the plane you want to make and dial-in to get the details right on your work.

why a laminated, pinned smoother rather than something more traditional? there’s one very simple reason – it’s much easier to build and the result is exactly the same on the wood. the board you’re working on doesn’t know how long you spent on your plane or how traditional-looking it is. this takes far less effort, time and skill and you get the same effect from the tool so that’s a win in my books.

why the 55-degree angle? you can pick any angle for the iron you like but i suggest a 55-degrees. this allows you to plane much more difficult, changing grain than a standard 45-degree angle. and it means you can put a back-bevel on your iron if you need to plane against the grain – a 10/15-degree back-bevel will give you an effective cutting-angle of 65/70-degrees, realistically a scraper, which can plane in any direction on almost any piece of wood without tearout. in its standard 55-degree configuration, you’ll almost never find a board you can’t plane without getting serious tearout and i suspect you’ll be happier – this is partly to compensate for the fact that a wooden plane is lighter than a metal-body plane and more likely to skip unless you have a lot of pressure down on it while you’re using it – which is actually harder on the same bench because the plane is physically taller when you use it than an equivalent metal, stanley/bailey-style with a tote-and-knob design.

for the same reason, this plane is larger than a stanley 4 (close to a 5, in fact) – the larger body will give you more mass, more momentum and make it easier to push through difficult or dense wood. the extra size doesn’t have the same exhaustion potential as a big metal plane used for the same purpose because, comparatively-speaking, wood is light.

enough talking about it. let’s build it. if this is your first time building a plane, be confident. this design is easy and it will work fine even if you’re not completely precise with all your measurements. there’s lots of extra room to adjust.

first you need to get your materials together. you’ll need some wood, material for a pin and glue. we’ve already talked about the wood but let’s get more specific. for the center section, you need a block of wood you can get at least 350x64x54mm from (the toe, heel and wedge). the extra length on the toe is to make sure you have room to adjust after gluing. the plane itself will be 310mm long. for glue, use pva. i mean, you can use whatever you want but pva works well and is cheap so that’s what i suggest. structural-epoxy will work fine but it’s expensive. urethane glue is great but, again, more expensive and much messier. hide glue is unethical, messy and cumbersome to work with so avoid that unless you really want the ghosts of dead things to haunt your plane. don’t use quick-epoxy or grain-based glue (rice, corn) because they’re just not strong enough for the application. be patient. pva takes a few hours to dry but it’s worth the wait. for the pin, you can use 8mm dowel but i suggest something stronger. a steel or brass pin works well and you can likely find one for almost no money – this pin takes a significant amount of pressure when you adjust and use the plane so a strong pin is less likely to wear out and it’s hard to replace it once the plane is glued together. there are ways to build the plane with an easily-replaceable pin but those methods have other downsides. you’ll also need material for the sides. these are nominally 320x64x8mm and will be trimmed to length when you shape the plane for your hands at the end to get a 310mm-long plane.

in terms of tools, you need a saw, a ruler, a protractor (or some other way to find angles) and, of course, a pencil (mechanical unless you really feel like going old-school, which is inadvisable in the shop). you’ll also need sandpaper of various grits. i suggest 120, 180, 220 and 320. beyond that is unnecessary for a tool. to finish, you can use anything you like. i generally finish shop things the same way i finish indoor projects – four or five thin coats of shellac rubbed on with a cloth. just remember your saw has to be able to cut all the way through a 54mm piece at an angle so if you’re using a backsaw (like a dozuki) you may not get all the way through the cut from one side. that means flipping the piece and sawing from the other side or using a bigger saw (like a ryoba or kataba). a western-style carcass saw will work fine for this project, too. unlike other plane methods, you won’t need a chisel for this project or – thankfully – another plane. there’s a caveat to that. you can sand your boards to prepare them but i suggest you use a plane for this if you have one. if you don’t already have a plane, though, you can seriously prepare all the stock with sandpaper and it’ll work – slowly. even if you just have an old plane that doesn’t work well, it should be fine to get you close for this and the rest can be refined with sandpaper once your components are cut.

let’s begin.

cut your 8mm-thick side pieces to 320x64mm (long grain along the long edge). prepare your center stock at 54x64mm then cut three pieces from it. the toe should be at least 200mm-long with a 70-degree angle on one end. the heel should be 110mm-long with a 55-degree angle on one end. the wedge should be made from the offcut that’s the same width and it should be 200mm long with a 10-degree taper, starting from 3mm-thick at its thinnest point. the angle doesn’t have to be exact. don’t go over 15 or under 8 or it won’t stay in very easily.

cut the slot for the thumb-screw in the heel (it should be about 7mm deep and 20mm wide but thumb-screws vary so size it to yours so there’s plenty of clearance – this shouldn’t touch and it’s just to give it room to slide so too-big is totally ok). cut this to about 20mm from the bottom of the heel (again, accuracy isn’t important as long as it can slide freely). clamp the whole thing together with the iron, chip-breaker and wedge in place. draw a line along the wedge. unclamp it and drill a 4mm-deep hole in each side 2-3mm closer to the heel than the pencil mark (to add pressure when the wedge is inserted next to the pin – if you put it on the line, the wedge won’t work and you’ll need a thicker wedge, which is fine but it’s nice to not have to make a new one – if you get this wrong, though, and there’s too much space between the chip-breaker and the pin in your final glueup, that’s ok – you can always just make a thicker wedge). sand and smooth all your parts at this point. they’ll glue better and it’s easier to sand things before they’re inside-surfaces.

now apply glue to the sides of the center pieces and clamp the sides in place. you want a very small gap between the toe and heel. enough you can fit your plane iron through it with almost no extra space. if you make this too small, you can always use sandpaper on a popsicle-stick to clean it up and make it wider. you can’t make it smaller – wood can only be taken away. if you’re worried about it, make the gap about 2mm and widen it after it’s glued together. clamp the whole thing together – don’t forget to clamp top and bottom, front and back to make sure it doesn’t slide while the glue is drying.

once it’s glued together, you can shape the whole object together. flush the ends and make sure it’s the length you’re aiming for (310mm is my target but you can change that to anything you like). round the top of the heel and toe – i suggest rounding them quite significantly but this is going to be in your hands so make the rounded edges fit the size of your hands. i use a circle with a radius about 40mm as a guide for how round i like it but it’s your tool so you can do whatever feels best. this is aesthetic, not functional.

do your final sanding, including making the mouth (the space between the heel and toe) the right size for your iron to stick out the end – it should only stick out just enough to feel, not several millimetres. this is a smoothing-plane, after all, and you’re aiming for very thin shavings. once the whole thing is smooth and you like how it feels in your hands, apply finish (thin shellac is wonderful for this because it’s protective and dries in only a few minutes between coats).

sharpen your iron and make sure it matches well with your chip-breaker (i’ve written a few articles and there are many, many videos on youtube by james wright, rex krueger and others about preparing irons and chip-breakers for use so go watch a few if you’re not clear on the process), stick it in the plane and tap your wedge in place to hold it. to adjust the iron, tap the end of the iron then tap the wedge to tighten it and lock the whole thing in place. to retract the iron, tap the heel (the face of the heel, not the top) – there are other places you can tap the plane but i find this the most effective in practice. use a small plane-adjustment hammer – a heavy hammer will just damage your plane and iron. try it out on a few boards and adjust the iron as needed with your hammer. now you have a smoother.

thanks for following along with me. i hope that’s been useful in your quest for a new plane!

click here to download (for free) the diagrams and basic build plans.

[estimated reading time 23 minutes]

i’ve been away from my usual life for a couple of days to get some medical treatment i’ve been waiting for and all the time traveling to and from the hospital and lying there unable to do anything – really anything (it was vision-related and my eyes simply didn’t work well enough to see a screen for many hours at a time) – i kept coming back to the same question. how do i build a workbench?

well, the first thing you need to do is separate the idea of “my workbench” from “my first workbench”. and this is a hugely-important step. everything you make can be better. everything everyone makes can be better. but the difference between the first time you make something and the second is usually where the huge leap in design and build quality happens. a workbench is probably the best example of this. before you have a real workbench, you have an idea of what you want it to be. you have theories. but you don’t have the experience of “i like this” or “this drives me crazy”.

for example, i spent a long time thinking of how wonderful it would be to have a shelf of two under the bench to keep stuff on. i thought it was going to be awesome to have places to put stock when it was being worked on but off the surface. or lay tools. anyway, i did it. i followed that advice – which is, by the way, extremely-common. and it was a disaster. the shavings from the bench fall through the dog-holes and more and more stuff accumulates under the bench. now i refuse to deal with shelves under a bench. either drawers/cabinets that are fully-enclosed – i prefer drawers and you’ll see a much-more-advanced bench design soon here in my more-comprehensive series on workbench-building and history that includes many of them – or a simple structure that is open and easy to clean around. i know people say the shelf gives the bench extra rigidity and strength. if you’re talking about a timberframe bench, you’ve got lots of that already. if you need the shelf to give you torsional anti-racking, you’ve fucked up your design at a much earlier point. you can build shelves if you want. but i suspect you’ll just be giving yourself a place to collect stuff that should be put away and kept clean – and all that dust on your tools attracts moisture and encourages rust. if nobody ever told you this before, clean your shop. now. cause the dustier your tools are the faster they’re rusting.

the second thing is to think about what a workbench is for. i’m assuming you work with handtools. not necessarily exclusively but you work with rough lumber and you do at least some handtool work and want a bench to do that on. you might also want a bench to route or do other powertool things on and that much the same thing. and you want an assembly-table so it’s best to have a workbench that doubles as that, too – i want a bigger shop and you probably do, too. if my shop was five-hundred-square-meters, i’d still want a bigger shop. almost never have i thought “i really want a bigger house” or “i want a bigger apartment” but i’ve constantly thought “a bigger shop would be awesome!” and i don’t think that ever goes away. it’s nice to have a table that works for everything. if you’re a commercial cabinetmaker and do most of your work on large machines from sheet goods, this might not be the bench for you. but you’re not a beginner and this isn’t the bench for you, anyway.

the third thing is cost. you want your first workbench to be relatively cheap. not cheap to the point it’s a shit bench. cause that’s not going to help anyone – and it’s not going to save you any money. you’ll just have to build another one and you’ll probably ruin a lot of expensive wood before you get around to building it. it’s one of those cost-benefit things. buy a mostly-worn-out used car and you’ll probably regret it. buy a moderately-old honda and it’ll usually be a very sensible purchase. buy a brand-new bmw and you might be happy with it but wow the money. for your first bench, even if you’re eventually going to buy the bmw eventually (ok, given the choice i’d seriously just buy a nice toyota and leave the europeans to their meaningless luxury – as you know, i’m anti-luxury in every possible way), i suggest starting with this bench, the ten-year-old, well-maintaned civic.

not quite a fourth thing but something to keep in mind. workbenches have been used for serious woodworking in much the same way for about as long as the teachings of the buddha have been around – two-and-a-half millennia. in all those years, we’ve learned a few things. when you’re designing and building furniture, innovate. be creative. go out on limbs and see if they fall off or sprout new life and spring into beautiful flowers. when building a workbench, do something that’s at least firmly-grounded in how things have been done. no, don’t do it just because it’s traditional – give up the old-school leg-vise and notch workholding and get yourself a modern twin-screw or at least cast-iron face/end-vise. and planing stops are just a cohesive recipe for bad technique and sloppy work. but they knew how to build a solid bench in pre-revolutionary france and tang-dynasty china. let’s not try to reinvent the wheel. they’ve done this already.

what they didn’t have was cheap dimensional lumber. and that is where this design comes in. and i’m going to take a little departure from my usual metric-only approach to talking about dimension. but with a caveat. the plans and design are metric. i’m going to give imperial measurements for your benefit as long as you understand they’re all approximate. i’m not going to say “approximate” every time – it will quickly get repetitive and annoying. but they are. 6mm is not exactly a quarter-inch and a foot is not exactly 300mm. but it’s close. if you’re going to build this, use a metric ruler or draw the whole thing out for yourself and do the calculations with fractions and such. it won’t work out quite the same but it’ll be a perfectly-fine result. if you try to build this based on the imperial estimates, though, you’ll end up with a bunch of things that don’t quite fit together. you’ve been warned.

so what are we planning to build? this.

the first thing you’re going to notice is what it’s made from. and this is something i tend never to do. it’s made from dimensional (framing) lumber. there are many things you can build a workbench from and i think the best thing you can use is a heavy, strong hardwood like hard-maple or a local species at least that hard. but when you’re building your first bench, there’s no reason to spend all that money when you can actually get by with something far, far cheaper. you might keep this bench a year or two until you have a really-solid idea of what you want to do. it will give you the ability to do all the things you need for now and, if you buy a nice twin-screw vise, you can always take that off and put it on a nice new hard-maple bench later so it’s not a wasted investment. when you’re finished with it, you won’t feel like it was a thousand dollars in lumber and you’ll probably give it to another beginner woodworker who needs a bench and wish them well.

this whole bench comes from a basic restriction many of my students face. they can get loads of 50x100s (2x4s). and that’s what they can afford and easily transport and work with. so they often start by making projects only from that. in your part of the world, it might be southern-yellow-pine. it might be douglas-fir. it might be redwood. whatever it is, that’s ok. this is rendered in something that looks vaguely like pine in the mockups i’m sharing with you but that’s no indication of one species being better than another. whatever you can get is totally ok. you’re going to be putting enough sheer thickness and density into this thing really any species will do. i’d avoid anything that doesn’t have a species listed – “whitewood” is more like working with a bar of soap than something the consistency of wood. but whatever you’d be comfortable building a wall with will work just fine for a basic bench.

so we’re talking about an all-2×4 bench. how many? well, that actually depends on you. because we’re all humans and we’re all different sizes so your workbench should be the right height for you. i’m not very tall. my bench is a little over 900mm tall, which most people say is far too tall for me. if you’re 190cm, though, that might be too short. if you’re 150cm, you might want a bench that’s dramatically shorter. which means shorter legs. less lumber. but a good approximation is that the benchtop (if you make it the size i’m talking about) will take eight 50x100x3050mm (2×4″x10′) boards. the legs will take about five more. the short stretchers will take another one and the long stretchers will take another four. so that’s eighteen of these boards. depending on how you cut it and the dimensions you actually pick for your bench (i encourage you to customize it to your needs and space – this is only a basic guideline, not final dimensions), you might need a few more or less than this. but this is all the lumber you’ll need. if you build this actual bench the same as i’ve detailed it here, you’ll end up spending far less than buying high-quality hardwood. but you should do your own research. the day i’m writing this, a 2x4x10 at lowe’s costs about $6.50 so 18 of them works out to be just over a hundred bucks – not bad for an entire bench worth of lumber.

what else do you need to build this thing? in terms of building materials, you’ll need glue. you will hear a lot about glue. if you’re a beginner, i suggest you ignore most of it. there are two basic glues useful for woodworking – pva (often just called “wood-glue” or “yellow-glue”) and structural-epoxy (like west system or totalboat, which you’ve certainly seen and heard a lot about if you frequent the youtube woodworking community). yes, things like ca and quick epoxy can be useful for very specific, temporary tasks. but these are the two modern general-application glues. when do you use pva? well, all the time. use epoxy when you have to do something that requires a lot of gap-filling, huge open-times and solid hold beyond what a basic glue can manage. it’s expensive and smells awful. regular wood-glue is cheap and works really well. there are other types of glue out there. don’t use them. hide glue, while being incredibly unethical (they literally grind up parts of dead animals to make it) is simply not nearly as effective, much messier and not as strong, especially if your environment will ever get hot or damp – it will get hot and damp, i suspect. urethane glue works fine but it’s far more expensive and the mess when using it is … not pleasant, to say the least. even if it wasn’t messy, though, it would be many times the cost of pva so it’s a bit of a moot point. use pva. for this project, using structural-epoxy would be like putting thousand-dollar hubcaps on your old honda.

in terms of tools, there are two ways you can go about this – the handtool way or the hybrid way. either way, you’re going to need three planes (a fore, a jointer and a smoother), a saw (a carcass saw or a kataba will work well for this and you really only need one saw for the whole project) and a chisel (i suggest a 32mm chisel because it’s efficient). yes. you’re going to have to chop four mortises. i’ve designed this to minimize mortising but there are four that are unavoidable. yes, you can decide to do this whole thing and leave out the mortise-and-tenon joints but they’re really not hard to make and even if they’re sloppy it doesn’t matter cause they’re just on the bottom short stretchers and nobody’s ever going to see them. none of the joints that are particularly visible require any mortise-chopping and this whole thing is meant to be as beginner-friendly as possible. you can attach the short stretchers another way – butt-joints and dowels. they’ll give the bench some strength but nowhere near as much. and no, even if you screw them in, you’re still not getting the anti-racking advantage a tenon-shoulder gives it. it’s up to you – it’s your bench. but my strong recommendation is make the mortises. they’re hidden and big so inaccuracy won’t really matter and the outside-edges of the mortise will simply not show in the finished product, anyway. this is a good place to cut your first ones, if you’ve never tried this joint.

here’s the cautionary tale. if you’re buying a couple of dozen long boards of cheap lumber, that’s not going to be a pleasant milling task by hand. it will take days, maybe weeks, to get that wood ready to build this project. if you have a benchtop planer, you can have the stock ready in a matter of under an hour. if you’re committed to handtool-only woodworking, i’ll tell you how you can do this with just your planes. but for the sake of a single tool – no, i’m not telling you to get a whole machine-filled shop, just one machine – this might be something to think about. stock-preparation is the most time-consuming thing you can do by hand. if i was a handtool-dominant woodworker, which i’m not, i’d still have a planer stuck out in my garage to do this milling-work. there’s nothing in this project you’ll be desperately wishing you had a bandsaw or tablesaw for. it’s all pretty simple joinery to do with a handsaw. and it’s a workbench so you’re not aiming for absolute-precision and there’s no tiny joinery to cut. but a planer will make your life much easier. if you quickly hop on craigslist or go to your home-center, you can pick one of these up cheaply for under $400. is a couple of weeks of your time on this project and untold hours on future ones worth it? i’ll leave that up to you. you can get a nice one if you like. but i highly-recommend getting at least a ryobi or dewalt basic lunchbox benchtop planer and saving yourself the headache.

that being said, you can definitely do the whole thing with just handplanes. if this is what you want, the first thing you’ll need to do is prepare all the stock. it doesn’t have to be all the same thickness but that’ll make it easier. i’m assuming you can get a nominal yield of 32x82mm from your 50x100mm boards. you might get more than that. if you get more, your bench will be slightly larger. if you only get 30x80mm, your bench will be slightly smaller. remember these are only rough guidelines. you need to take your own measurements. mine are all based on 32x82mm from each board. the length of the boards is irrelevant cause you’re cutting those to length, anyway. the important part is to get them flat and smooth and remove any factory curved edges. you want a rectangular prism that’s made of four ninety-degree angles, nothing more or less. “square stock”, we can call it. or “surfaced-four-sides”. i recommend getting this as smooth and flat as possible before starting. you’re going to have to do it eventually and it’s easier when it’s not glued or joined together. if you’re doing it with handplanes, start by getting the pieces approximately flat and level with a foreplane, joint them with the jointer then smooth them with a smoother. i’ve explained how to do this in many places and there are literally hundreds of videos on youtube showing how to square a piece of stock. if you’re committed to just using planes, you probably already know how to do this, anyway. if you’re using a planer, run all the stock through on both sides and both edges to get to final dimension. like i said, you’re aiming for about 32x82mm so if you get there you’re doing well.

beyond the basic tools, you’re going to need some clamps. how many you need depends on what you have and how much of this you want to do at a time. i suggest pipe-clamps if you don’t have any. f-style and quick-release clamps aren’t going to be strong enough and bar-clamps (parallel-jaw clamps) are very expensive and not necessary for this project. for gluing the benchtop, you’ll probably need at least six. i would suggest using more – at least ten. again, up to you how much pressure you feel comfortable putting into the thing. but i suspect you’ll find more clamps is better than fewer clamps. i’m going to suggest you do all this gluing in sections. there are a few reasons for this but it really comes down to simplicity. you can glue the entire bottom structure together all-at-once. but that’s a huge nightmare and this much wood is heavy to move around. it’s easy to make mistakes and that’s not an easy thing to fix in the moment with adhesives drying around you. the same with the benchtop. you can put it together as a single glueup. unless you’re looking for problems, i’d say that’s a bad idea. if you’re going to try to do multiple glueups at the same time, which you probably will, you’ll need more clamps. you can never have too many. a few dozen is a basic minimum for most woodworkers and i am certain a couple of hundred would never feel like enough. you’ll also need a big square. i suggest a speed-square or a framing-square. to check for square when you make your parts. it doesn’t have to be expensive (read starrett) – just pick one up at your local hardware store and it’ll be just fine. you need one that can check both inside and outside angles. the ones with triangles in the middle aren’t sufficient but one that’s shaped like a big l will work regardless of brand or material. we’re not aiming for surgical precision here, just close-enough-for-a-bench. you’ll actually level and smooth everything from time to time as you work, anyway, and the thing will naturally skew and get damaged. it’s a tool. this isn’t a fine piece of furniture.

so let’s begin with the benchtop. this benchtop is totally customizable to whatever length and width you want. but i think this is a reasonable size for most people, especially beginners. you’ll find people who say you should have a deeper or longer bench and, if that’s what you want, go for it. you can stretch this out to 2400 or even 3600mm and the whole thing will still work for you without any issues. if you’re going to make a 3600mm bench, though, i’d say you may want to add some legs supporting the middle. just saying. or think about making two 1800mm benches and putting them end-to-end cause moving a 3600mm bench will be a nightmare and i promise you’ll have to move it eventually. the benchtop in these plans is 512mm (20″) wide, 1800mm (5’11”) long and 82mm (3.25″) thick. you won’t get more thickness unless you use larger lumber, which you’re welcome to do. you can make it wider by adding more laminations or longer by simply cutting the boards longer.

we’re going to make this by laminating multiple pieces together. this style of benchtop was popular in europe and is the one people often think of as “roubo-style” for a benchtop. practically-speaking, roubo was actually describing a massive slab-top bench that was already common at his time but it’s an excellent, traditional approach to a stable work-surface and we’re going to liberally copy it. in roubo’s design, the whole thing is held together with sliding-dovetails and mortises cut in the slab. we’re going to make the joinery dramatically simpler – through-mortise-and-tenon joints without having to actually cut any holes in the benchtop. we’ll do that by leaving gaps when we laminate. to do this, you’re going to need to prepare a few spacers. the spacers should be off-cuts from your standard stock at least 82mm long (i’d say aim for at least 100mm just to avoid any problems). what you need to do with these is glue two pieces together (face-to-face) and clamp them. you’ll end up with blocks that are about 64x82x100mm and the important part is that the 64x82mm part is exactly the size of two of your bench component pieces stacked face-to-face. when you have four of those glued together and dry, wrap them in packing-tape. you’re going to use those as spacers when you glue the benchtop together and you don’t want them getting stuck in place. with that done, we can make the benchtop.

i’m going to talk about “pieces” throughout. these are all the same – 32x82x… some length. assume all the components are cut from standardized stock you’ve already prepared.

to do this, you need 12 pieces cut at 1800mm, 8 at a little over 400mm (they’ll be trimmed to size later) and 4 at 1016mm. we’re going to glue this together in four pieces then glue the four pieces together to make the benchtop.

the first two are really simple. laminate 4 of the 12 long boards face-to-face and clamp them. you want the clamps to alternate between the top and bottom of the boards, pressing the glue-joint together the entire length of the joint, evenly-spaced. aim for at least one clamp every 200mm, either top or bottom. that means probably no fewer than six or seven clamps, preferably nine or ten for each glueup. you can do one at a time or both of these. try to keep them as flat and level as possible. it will save you time smoothing them after it’s all glued.

the other two are identical but not the same as the first two. the outside boards in each are long but you’ll stack the interior boards with the spacers. each edge will have a 400mm section, a spacer, a 1016mm section, another spacer then the final 400mm section. you’re making a sandwich and both should look the same. if your pieces are exactly 400mm, they should be flush with the ends of the sandwich boards (1800mm) but this is hard to accomplish so i would cut them at least 10-20mm too long and trim them after the glue dries so they’re flush – it’s easier to be accurate in hindsight than foresight.

these should be clamped the same way. you can build all four of these benchtop assemblies at once and let them dry or you can do one at a time. it really depends on how much space you have and how many clamps you’ve acquired. if you don’t have enough clamps, ask your friends. woodworkers often have more than you might think and are usually pretty generous about lending them if you just need them for one big job – you won’t know if you don’t ask.

when those are done, here’s a quick tip if you have a planer. take each newly-glued-up assembly and use the planer to make sure they’re all completely level before moving on. it will save you loads of time flattening with a plane after the next step. the full top won’t fit through the planer but each of these pieces will. if you’re doing this whole thing with only handtools, don’t bother to smooth and flatten at this point. just make sure the outside edges have no glue on them (if there is, use a chisel to scrape it off) and move on.

the next glue procedure is laminating these four pieces into a sixteen-piece benchtop. it’s the same as what you just did with four pieces of long stock. they’re just a lot thicker now and will require more clamping pressure. you’ve had four practice runs with easier boards already, though, so you should be able to get it all glued tightly together, face-to-face. again, try to keep them as even as possible. you might want more than just 8-10 clamps to get this to stick together. i think i used 24 clamps. it’s up to you. but if you don’t get enough clamping pressure the glue joint won’t be as strong. you’re going to be pounding on this bench for years. i’d suggest making sure the pressure is sufficient.

with that done, you’re about half-finished the whole project and you can congratulate yourself. this is actually the most cumbersome and heavy part done. the rest is quite a bit easier to work with because the laminations are smaller. by the way, all the diagrams and measurements are in the pictures at the end of the article if you’re wondering why you haven’t seen them yet. i recommend reading the whole procedure first before you even think about making it yourself. you can skip to the pictures but i think they’ll make more sense when you hear the process.

most builds like this glue the two ends together before gluing the long stretchers. that often makes sense. in this case, we’re going to do the long stretchers first because those are easier and it will be far simpler to get them together, assembling the short ones in the spaces we’ve left.

before we get into that part, though, we’re going to prepare the benchtop.

i assume you have some sawhorses. stick it up on some, face-up. if you don’t have sawhorses, you can definitely do this step on the floor. it just won’t be as comfy and you should probably get some sawhorses anyway. up to you.

use a chisel to scrape off any big bits of glue that’s squeezed out. don’t worry. it won’t damage your chisel. now treat the whole thing as a single board. first, knock out the spacers – this is why you wrapped them in packing-tape. they should be easy to slide out with the help of a hammer – be somewhat gentle. you don’t want to damage the benchtop at this point. it should be quite stable even without the leg structures attached, though. it’s sixteen pieces of wood glued together with a few holes in the middle so we’re not talking about a cheap desktop here. it’s big and solid. with those knocked out, make sure the insides of those holes are clean without any glue. you can again use your chisel to make sure they’re smooth and flat. with that done, turn your attention to the bottom of the benchtop. joint and smooth it with your planes. you probably won’t need the fore. it should already be relatively level. flip it over and do the top – why start with the bottom? if the thing is sitting on your floor or sawhorses, the side facing down will probably get scratched. might as well smooth the top of the bench last so it’s got less visible damage from the process. assuming you have it raised off the ground, you should be able to joint and smooth all four sides of the benchtop at this point, too. you can do this either now or at the end. i would do it at the end. if you want to do it now, flush-cut the four pieces sticking out (assuming they were >400mm) and joint and smooth the edges the same as you did the bottom and top.

you’re going to need four spacers again. you can use the same four as long as they’re still stable and clean. i recommend making four new ones, though. they’re exactly the same. don’t forget the packing-tape coating – you’ve already seen why and you can imagine what those would have been like to get out without it.

these assemblies are actually a little more strange-looking than the benchtop was because we’re making tenons without cutting anything. all four are identical.

the outside pieces in the sandwich are 738mm. the inside pieces start from the floor with a 180mm piece, a spacer then a >558mm piece. this will give you a bench-height of 820mm (about 32.25″) so you should adjust this to your desired height. add or remove height from the bottom of all four pieces equally. you don’t need to shift any of the other math around. the spacing of the holes doesn’t change. all the other measurements from the floor, though, assume this is the leg-length so remember to add or subtract from those measurements whatever you change about these ones. when i saw >558mm, i mean cut it a little long so we can trim it later. it should, if everything is good, end up at exactly 558mm. but i’d cut it more like 580mm and assume things will all get cleaned up at the end.

glue these together the same as the benchtop components. unlike the benchtop, though, these are finished after a single glueup. get rid of any squeezeout and joint and smooth them after knocking out the spacers – this is the last piece of the build where spacers are used so they’ve now done their job admirably.

let’s move on to the long stretchers. these are an inverted-sandwich with the middle wider than the outside. the long pieces are >1180mm and the short ones on the outsides are 1016mm (remember, 1180 is the target length and you can go closer to 1220 and trim them back for safety if you like). you’re aiming for the same extra on both ends of the longer boards – 82mm on all sides – if this measurement sounds familiar, it should – it’s the thickness of the benchtop and the legs, our nominal-yield from our original boards. when they’re dry, joint and smooth them.

now we’ll do the short stretchers. these are really simple. you need two outside pieces for each and a center piece. the center piece is 448mm and the outside ones are 256mm. make a sandwich with the middle sticking out equally on both sides – it should be 96mm. clamp this together and let it dry. then do the same with it as you did for the other stretchers with your jointer and smoother.

the next piece is the part you’ve probably been worrying about. but it’s not hard at all – cutting a mortise. you’ve already got the tenons. they’re the inverted-sandwich pieces of the short stretchers. now get your pencil and mark out the place where the mortise will go on the insides of the four legs. if you’re using my leg lengths, this will be 60mm from the ground. if you’ve changed the length of the legs, don’t forget to shift this the same amount. if you want to make a really short bench, you can move these short stretchers so they’re above the long ones and the strength will be the same. i think they look better on the bottom. you can put them at the same height but that makes the joinery much more complex and doesn’t add any rigidity.

the mortise should be 82mm tall and 32mm wide with 25mm from each side to the edge of the leg. this is why we talked about using a 32mm chisel. this mortise doesn’t have to be clean or accurate. but it has to be big enough and deep enough to hold the tenon. it’s going to be hidden by the short stretcher except its top and bottom lines – the sides will disappear and, of course, the bottom will be completely invisible inside the leg. take your chisel and hold it across the grain of the wood, start from the center and pound in at 45-degrees. then turn the chisel 180-degrees and pound in at 45-degrees to create a v. the middle piece should come out. move the chisel a few millimeters away from the center and do the same, rotate 180-degrees and complete the bigger v. keep repeating this process and moving out in the direction of the short walls of the mortise. the width should remain the width of your chisel. as you get closer and closer to the short walls, your chisel will become more and more perpendicular to the face of the board. by the time you get to the walls, you’ve chopped a mortise. periodically check the depth by holding the chisel in the mortise at its lowest point – you’re aiming for 96mm. a few millimeters too shallow is going to be a problem but a few too deep is no issue at all so better 100 than 92. your tenon has to fully fit in the hole. when you get it approximately there, use your chisel to scrape the sides and bottom to finish it then do the other three. see? mortises aren’t anything to be worried about. precision will come with practice but this is a brute-force mortise and shouldn’t take very long.

you now have all the components ready to be assembled but it’s still best to do this in stages. before even thinking about gluing, put the whole thing together. make sure everything fits. you don’t want any surprises. if anything is tight, use your chisel or rough sandpaper to make sure things slide together easily. if you’ve measured everything, it should all work.

i recommend gluing the short-stretchers to the legs first. then glue the assembled short-stretcher-leg assemblies to the long-stretchers. then glue the complete bottom to the complete top. yes, the ends of the tenons from the long-stretchers and the legs will poke through. you’ll need to flush those with a saw.

when you get the short-stretchers glued together, you’ll discover the sides stick out quite a bit. you have a choice here. you can use your planes to smooth them so they’re flush or you can simply ignore it. either way is fine. i would flush them because it looks better but it’s a bench – a tool – and it’ll work completely the same whichever you choose. if you’re not sure it’s worth the effort, you can always leave it and flush it later if it annoys you. i’m pretty obsessive about details so i know i’d have to do it and it’s easier to get it out of the way now. it shouldn’t take more than a few minutes with fore, jointer and smoother to get the surfaces all nice and flush if that’s what you’re looking for. the overhang is about 7mm (9/32″) on each side, by the way. so it’s not a lot of material to remove.

with that done, get out your smoother again and finish all the surfaces.

now comes the time to make sure everything stays together as solidly as possible. this is not a required step but i think it adds a lot of future-proofing to it because glue can always weaken over time but holes are forever. these are drilled in precise places in the diagram but close enough is fine. they’ll look much better if they’re precise but they’ll work just fine if they’re a few millimeters in any direction. the whole thing is strengthened using 12mm (.5″) dowels. drill the holes (brace-and-bit and auger or powerdrill and forstner or spade-bit – completely up to you as long as you get 12mm holes). these dowels can be homemade or bought. remember if you get commercial dowels they might not be exactly 12mm and the measurements will need to be modified. drill them all as showed in the diagrams, pound in the dowels, flush them with your saw and use your smoother to trim them so they don’t stick out.

the final detail, also optional, is something i find very helpful – holes for round bench-dogs. these work as stops and braces against your vises. they keep work from moving and allow so much flexibility of workholding i think they’re invaluable. that being said, you can always drill as many or as few as you like. i find having them about every 150-200mm in four rows has been my preferred layout. i also like having them on the front surface of my bench so i can prop up a piece without having to use any external support if i’m holding it to plane the edge in the vise and it’s longer than the vise can normally support. they’re very flexible and – this is the best part – they’re free because they’re just holes. you can make some bench-dogs from scrap or buy commercial ones. you can even skip having a vise altogether and get a dog-hole surface clamp – veritas, for example, makes several excellent dog-mounted clamping solutions that would work really well. i use 20mm dogs so i use 20mm holes. size your dog-holes to fit your desired dogs. drill them in the middle of your laminations to avoid splitting the wood. when you drill them, go almost all-the-way-through and, when the bit pokes out the bottom, drill the last bit from the bottom. this way, you’ll avoid extra blowout on the bottom of the bench. if you get it, that’s ok. it’s the bottom of your workbench and nobody’s going to be looking. but it’s nice to know you were careful, right?

as far as vises go, my recommendation is to get one vise for the face and one for the end. i use the same one for both – the veritas twin-screw. but that’s a very expensive vise and you may not want to spend that much money. there’s definitely another option, though. i’ve seen them as cheaply as $30-40 on ebay and at home-centers made from cast-iron and they’re usually just called “woodworking vises”. they’re simple and you can add two wooden jaws to protect your work. i recommend getting one with a dog-hole so you can use it in combination with your dog-holes on the bench.

i guess the only thing left to do is finish the bench. some people leave their benches unfinished. i think that’s unwise – the finish isn’t for show. it’s to protect the bench and you don’t want it to start degrading on you. we’re not talking about a film-finish. all the work would destroy that, anyway. you can use your preferred finish but my recommendation is to use a few coats of shellac. wipe it on, let it dry, wipe on another coat. you’ll have it dry and ready for use in a matter of a few hours and it will definitely make the wood look richer and the whole project look more complete.

this is the first in a whole series of bench designs and build instructions but i figured it would be far better to start with something beginner-friendly, simple and cheap to make. this whole thing can be made for a little over a hundred dollars worth of wood (in most of the united states and canada) plus some glue, effort and basic tools. if you have a little planer, it’s a project that can be knocked-together in a matter of hours (plus gluing time). otherwise it might take a few weeks but it should be a fun and relatively-simple build. if you feel up to building a bench, good luck! if you have any questions or want to check anything before you start, please get in touch. i’m always happy to help if i can. thanks for reading!

click here to download the plans including 2d/3d diagrams.

[estimated reading time 13 minutes]

something that’s been on my mind lately is the practical side of hobbyist and student woodworking. i have the advantage of a significant amount of shop-time in a typical week. while i don’t spend as much time as i’d like building furniture, i do spend a lot of time designing and teaching about it and that is a luxury many hobbyists and students i encounter simply don’t have. the other thing is that i don’t have to think nearly as much about the cost of materials because my reason for doing this is mostly educational rather than production — i’m not building furniture for my house and the initial outlay is usually going to be covered either by revenue from teaching about that particular project later or writing about it in a magazine or whatever. while that’s not generally explicit (selling a project with $500 of lumber for $2500 and it being definitely worth the investment), the fact that i have to build a piece a few times before i can teach it in class comes with the territory and there’s just no way i’m worth my teaching fees if i haven’t at least gone through the entire project we’re making in advance to make sure there are no possible problems — usually at least a few times, honestly, as there are always issues the first time building anything, as i’m sure any woodworker has discovered.

this is, of course, the reason i always encourage people to prototype everything using cheap materials regardless of the desired outcome. even if you’re only planning to ever build one, you want the one you build to be the best-possible version you can make and that’s never going to be the first attempt. building a workbench? plan on making a second one. soon. making a dining-table? make sure you do a mockup in construction lumber because something will definitely go wrong and you don’t want to spend hundreds on some beautiful cherry or walnut and have to start looking for stop-gaps or change the dimensions of your table because you’d just cut a piece the wrong size or at the wrong stage of the process.

but one of the things i’ve talked about in passing though rarely spent a lot of time discussing is probably the most important part of the whole process. there are several stages in the design process the way i do it.

• first i get a vague idea of the shape of a piece. i do this on sketch-paper, drawing curves and angles and forms in a loose, fast style to get the motifs i want to include on paper. is it going to be japanese-style? korean? mission? arts-and-crafts? they all have signature aesthetic details.
• second, i start trying to get the lines. once i have the things in my head on paper in a quick sketch (or a hundred), i can start to refine. i’m not worried about scale at this point. how thick the pieces are doesn’t matter. i’m treating the whole thing as a dimensional shape. so the piece tends to look a little spindly but i’m trying to get the outside shape. you can think of this as the “block-size” — in other words, if i was going to wrap the piece and stick it under the christmas tree, what would it look like as a silhouette?
• third, with the lines in place, i start to worry about specifics like angles. particularly angles, actually. dimensions can come a bit later but things like rake and splay of legs, taper angles, etc. these define the aesthetic of the piece a lot more than the size — having a ten-degree taper on a leg changes a huge amount about its look but whether it’s 500mm tall or 600mm tall is a much more subtle thing. of course, some of these dimensions are built-in and have to be there if the piece is fitting in a space. you know your bookcase is going to be about 1800mm tall. you know your chair is going to be about 460mm to the top of the seat. because they have to exist in the real-world. and that’s a good way to start — fill in all the necessary dimensions then worry about the proportion of the secondary ones. but first i try to get all the angles right in my head.
• fourth, i get all the dimensions solidified — once i have the necessary ones in place, i move to the secondary ones then, finally, to the thicknesses and depths — for example, i start with the height and width of a desk then worry about its depth then about the thickness of the components and, finally, about its drawer-components and things like runners and internal dividers. start with what you see that changes how a piece feels then move to the things you see that have less impact then to the things you don’t really see or notice.
• fifth, i try it out in-real-life. this is what we’re going to talk about today.
• sixth, of course, i build it, starting with a prototype or two to make sure it’s what i want then moving to a final-ish piece, perhaps making one or maybe moving on to making many, especially after i’ve gotten the prototype solidified and any problems solved so i can batch-create a dozen or more of them in a classroom setting. or maybe just one for a friend who needed it in the first place.

see what i mean about glossing-over the trying-it-out-in-real-life step? this is what happens every time i talk about the process. and, because there’s so little said about it, people tend to skip it. like it’s not important. well, today i’m telling you i think it’s not just a significant step but perhaps the most important one other than the final build. this is how i suggest you do it. it’s my process and it works for me and most of the people i’ve encouraged to try it — ok, forced to try it. it’s what i use in-class as a pre-prototyping method. but i have found that students who use it in-class find it both effective and efficient and use it when they are no longer being graded on their work.

what is this process? well, i should probably first mention this isn’t “my process” in the ownership sense. i didn’t create this process and i would be an idiot to take credit for something that’s been common in the artistic world for centuries — it’s hard to be the inventor of something that’s existed since before your grandparents were born! but it’s actually surprisingly-rare in woodworking. i’ve definitely seen a few well-known woodworkers use something similar but not many. if you’re curious and want to look at some other examples of it in the wild, you’ll find articles in various magazines (fine woodworking, popular woodworking, etc) by michael pekovich and tom mclaughlin about their design procedures. by the way, they both have extremely different processes from me in practice but i mention them not because we design similarly (though i’m told my designs are similar to sir pekovich’) but that this particular step is a large portion of their process. i do almost my entire process in 3d-modeling software (fusion 360 or shapr3d — usually the first for many reasons i will discuss in another article — but never — and i repeat never — sketchup, as it’s a massive waste of time and effort) while mclaughlin does the whole process on paper and pekovich is more old-school and does most computer-modeling in 2d using design software, instead. i guess i’m a child of my generation, after all — i remember checking out library books on cad/cam when i was a preteen and the local library was bringing them in from the university because nobody but engineering students and me were interested.

so let’s talk about it. full-size drawings and 3d-in-real-life placement. first we’ll look at how to do it then talk a bit about why you should — and why you shouldn’t see this as an extra step to be eliminated as you get better at woodworking, much more a vital component even in an expert’s arsenal of tools.

to talk about the how, i need to take you through my design process. i think this is the process you should be following. you don’t have to. but it simplifies things in your whole creative life and the cost is extremely low — usually the cost of a few sheets of paper and some tape. it requires no rulers, complex measuring devices, specialized drafting or drawing or sketching equipment or any artistic talent — which is, by the way, just a proxy for “experience”. if you want to learn how to draw, you need to spend thousands of hours practicing drawing. i draw adequately. which is quite an admission for someone who teaches design and, for a few years, fine-art at the college level — in my defense, i was mostly teaching photography and media studies, areas i truly am experienced in doing in industry. but being seen as a talented artist by the students always felt like a bit of an act, especially when i was asked to fill-in for others in the department to coach their sketching and painting classes when sudden illnesses occurred. i know the theory. but i haven’t put in the hours of practice. i got through it, though. and i do love drawing, just not enough to spend thousands of hours on it.

so this is what i do. no drawing talent required.

every design process starts with inspiration. i look at hundreds, thousands, sometimes tens-of-thousands of photographs for inspiration. sometimes i look at things in the desired style. more often, i look at things in the desired form — if i’m building a dining-table, i look at thousands of pictures of tables from all schools of design before even thinking about refining my style because so many things are common — proportion, dimension, structure, etc. i want to get those all firmly-grounded in my head before i get specific.

something i should mention here is that i’ve designed and built a lot of things. a lot. this isn’t a “beginner thing”, looking at many examples. i think it’s possibly even more important for someone experienced who might have gotten stuck in habits of thinking “this is how you build a table” or “this is my personal style”. there are always many ways and your style is never fixed in a single place until you’re dead. you should always be growing, adapting and developing. so you should be looking. not looking at photographs of beautiful furniture for inspiration would be like a writer saying they’re never reading another novel because they don’t need to see how others write or a painter simply avoiding all art galleries for the rest of their life.

once i have the inspiration, i take all the little notes i made — i always make notes when i look at things, by the way, though perhaps your memory is better than mine and i suspect, after all the medication i’ve been forced to take in my life, it probably is. my students generally tell me they look at photographs and start sketching once they have a more solid idea. master-craftspeople i know say much the same thing. i start sketching while i’m looking at the inspiration images. take your pick. either is totally fine. so i take those notes and sketch a vague design. then i sketch another. and another. when i have maybe ten or twenty rough designs, i take them all and stick them to the wall with tape. or pins. where i am now there’s no corkboard so i just use tape. i stare at them for a few minutes or while i do something else that doesn’t require much attention and try to see what i like and don’t like about them.

with that in mind, i try to draw a realistic shape of the piece. it doesn’t have to be perfect and it’s not going to be the final outline in any sense. but i try to get the thing done. front-view, side-view, top, bottom, whatever i need to remind myself what i want it to look and feel and function like — which way do the drawers go? how are the shelves divided? i make notes on the paper like “this shelf is the only one for tall books” or “i need three tiny drawers up here for different types of paper”. with that done, i put the paper and pencil away.

i always get asked, by the way, what i sketch on and with what. i don’t think this really matters nearly as much as people seem to give it credit for but here’s my answer. i use a kuru toga mechanical pencil — it’s awesome because it rotates the graphite to make sure it’s always sharp and never gets a weird angle when you’re drawing, making your lines more accurate — at .5mm. and i draw on watercolor paper or, if i’m just rough-sketching and don’t care too much, basic copy-paper. i know a lot of people like to sketch with fancy pens in expensive pads but here’s my simple way to look at it — i want a pad that’s about letter-size, no more than about a hundred pages or it’s too think and coil-bound so it doesn’t keep closing and i can flip the whole thing open to a single page. i don’t want anything getting in the way — i’m not a great artist so i’ll take all the lack-of-distraction i can get. you can use what i use or you can use something else. the important part is to get paper that’s big enough (don’t use a tiny pad), plain enough (no lines, for fuck’s sake) and won’t get in the way (coil-bound is nice but you can get anything that sits flat) and a mechanical pencil you like the feel of in your hand — if you’re ok with the plastic bics, that’s totally fine. i think the aluminum is much more comfortable and a better size that’s easier for me to hold and i’ve had the same two pencils for years so the twenty-dollar investment was well-worth-it.

then i load fusion 360. no. i don’t go through an intermediary stage of designing in something simpler like sketchup (which is awful) or shapr3d (unless i’m not at my laptop) or illustrator (as much as i love illustrator — it really is the best design software ever made and i use it nearly every day — it’s not nearly as useful for 3d work and it requires far too much imagination and mental energy, though it can definitely be done, as is seen in pekovich’ designs and sometimes i use it for things like kumiko patterns where 2d faces are so important and the depth is an afterthought). i start designing right there on the blank screen.

first i take the things from my sketches and put them in. then i start constraining them with actual measurements. then i move them around until they feel right. i talked about this multistage process already, starting with outlines and shapes, gradually progressing to more and more secondary measurements and specifics. i’ve talked about this process in quite a bit of detail before but i suspect i may have to make some videos about it to really show people the process in-depth. i think you probably get the idea, though.

at this point, though i have no affiliation, i should probably mention a series of videos. there are many paid courses in how to use fusion 360 for design, often specifically for woodworking design. they might be relatively good courses but i promise you can save your money. there are two things you should watch if you want to learn to use fusion 360 and they’ll get you so far down that road you’ll find the paid ones are simply telling you things you already know. the first is a relatively-recent video i was very impressed with by foureyes furniture detailing their process for design in fusion 360. this gives you a great basic introduction to how it can be useful in your workflow. but if you really want to learn how to use it, watch the introductory videos by lars christiansen and — and here’s the really important part — watch as many of his livestreams and instructional videos about more advanced skills as you can find time for. they’re not about woodworking. but they’re incredibly-useful and i use those skills every day. i encourage my students to watch them all — he’s engineered the videos mostly for beginners and you can use the program and follow his steps as he does them. anyway, i’ve never done video tutorials for fusion 360 and i don’t really have any plans to in the near future. but i’ve taught it quite a bit — there’s no need for more instructional content about it, honestly, given how thorough christiansen’s channel is and i try to be useful with my information. maybe time to do a few woodworking-specific things like working with dimensional stock but that’s an idea for another day.

i will assume you know how to use the software and have built a reasonable 3d model of your project. don’t worry about getting it perfect. the idea is to get the approximate shape. don’t forget to make it look like wood. it doesn’t have to look like the actual wood you’re going to use — i almost always tell it to look like oak because the oak texture is fairly nice in color and easy to see on-screen, regardless of what i’m actually building from, which is almost never oak — maple and cherry, occasionally walnut. the issue here is to make sure you have a vague idea in your head and sometimes those metallic-looking hard shapes just don’t do it but your head will make the leap from fake-onscreen-wood to real-life-wood much more easily than plastic-to-tree-parts.

with that done, print your model. life-size. seriously. export the whole thing as a pdf (there’s another way to do this and i’ll get to that in a second) and print it. if you use adobe’s reader, which i suggest using, you can use its “poster-mode”, allowing you to print on multiple sheets of paper with guide-line so you can fold and tape them together to get an actual-size representation of the parts. what’s the other way? take measurements, get a huge sheet of paper, draw by hand and wonder why you didn’t just print the thing from a pdf. you only need to do this for the front-view, really. though you may want to repeat this technique for the side-view on some projects if you are wondering about it later in the process.

some people will tell you, at this stage, to stick it to the wall where you are thinking of at-least-temporarily staging the piece or, if it’s something more permanent, where it will live. and i advocate this process if you don’t have the willingness to go a little deeper but i think you should. get a cardboard box. tape the design to the front of the box so it hides the box but the box keeps it flat. trim the box so you don’t see any of it sticking out from behind the printed design. now check the depth of the piece and use the box to position the thing so the front-face of your piece is as far from the wall as it’s intended to be. your design at this point might be just lines or it could be a color/black-and-white textured print. either works. but now you have a representation not only of what it will look like in the space but its physical presence.

go to the other side of the room and sit — i sit on the floor but you can use a chair if you prefer. look at it. then do something else. look back at it from time to time. perhaps do this over a period of days. keep notes. what do you like? what don’t you like? does it look too big or small? are there parts that don’t seem to fit? are the curves too subtle? too aggressive? what about the thicknesses of the parts? do they look too bulky or maybe, though i’ve never made this mistake on designs and tend to always design too-fat components at first, too thin and spindly? keep going until you stop thinking of things you’d like to change. then go back to your model and change them.

repeat the process.

do this until you’ve got one you’re happy with. then move on. this will save you untold hours of building and literally thousands of dollars of material costs, not to mention the self-loathing that comes with building a piece only to realize the sides are so over-thick it looks like your chair was meant to be a prop in a hippopotamus park.

i know it’s nothing revolutionary from a conceptual standpoint. but offset-fullsize-prints as a design tool is probably the single most significant thing in my whole experience of designing and building that has taken my furniture to the next level. if you want to design better, it might not actually have anything to do with having better ideas, more talent or more time to spend on designing at all. it may just be that you haven’t made enough mistakes before building the piece. make the mistakes on paper. paper’s cheap. wood’s not.

i hope that’s useful and gives you something to contemplate when you’re getting ready to do your next project. may the spirits of the trees keep you safe and smiling today. thanks for reading!

[estimated reading time 7 minutes]

no, i don’t mean you should talk like a hick. or write like an uneducated fuck. i mean you should stop writing (or reading) formal poetry. formal poetry isn’t formal in the sense of “honorific” or “respectful”. it’s formal like “written in a form” — a sonnet, for example, or something that rhymes like a couplet or blank-verse poem. there are many modern freestyle poets who say “there’s nothing wrong with traditional forms but i don’t write in them”. i was one of those for a long time, though it wasn’t actually true. i didn’t think there was nothing wrong with traditional poetry. i just couldn’t put my finger on exactly what the problem was. then i did. it’s language evolution. there wasn’t nearly as much wrong with them when they were new. there’s something massively-wrong with them now. this is why you should give them up. even if you’re just starting out. and why every poetry-creative-writing program in the world should scrap them from their curriculums. they’re not just worthless and useless. they actually train you to write bad poetry — even when you stop using them.

english is an evolutionary language. of course, all languages have evolved over time. when they stop changing based on popular usage and cultural influence, they become dead languages and nobody speaks them anymore outside academia. but i don’t mean it’s evolutionary in the general, shifting sense. i mean it’s rapidly changing based on pressure in a way other languages simply don’t — and this has been sustained for at least the last century. if you take a book or news broadcast written a century ago and compare the grammatical and vocabulary structure and content with one from this year, you will notice a huge difference. massive. unavoidably. if the book or broadcast is modern, it will use completely different grammar to the point that many people barely understand the words and structures from that time.

do the same comparison with things written and recorded fifty years ago. even twenty-five or thirty and you’ll see an unavoidable progression. this progression has had two main paths. there is a general shift from indirect grammar to direct. and there is a simplification of vocabulary to move from noun-focused speech to verb and adjective-focused speech. i’ll give you a few examples.

• that is a great idea!
• that idea is great!
• the shop to which i daily go is that which provides me the best prices.
• the store with the best prices is where i go every day.
• the person whom i was at that time, which was ten years ago, was a different person from the person i am today.
• who i was ten years ago is different from today.

these are not extreme examples. they’re completely common, standard, everyday shifts in the english language from the old to the new. and these aren’t examples from a hundred years ago. these were common only twenty-five years ago, a remarkably-short evolutionary timeframe.

so here’s the first reason those metrical forms are silly — meter implies a standardized stress-pattern. english has always been talked about historically as having a fluctuating intonation and a roughly iambic rhythm. in shakespeare’s time this was completely true. it’s not true of modern english. let’s take a look at these same examples with that in mind. we’ll get to intonation in a minute but we’ll start with stress-rhythm — the difference between accented (hard, marked with h) and unaccented (soft, marked with s). if this is a new concept, iambic rhythm

• that is a great idea!
  • s h s h s h s (iambic pattern)
• that idea is great!
  • s s h s s h (decidedly not iambic pattern)
• the shop to which i daily go is that which provides me the best prices.
  • s h s h s h s h s h s s h s s h h s (no, iambic pattern isn’t completely standard by this point in history but it’s close)
• the store with the best prices is where i go every day.
  • s h s s s h s s s s s h s h (not even close)
• the person whom i was at that time, which was ten years ago, was a different person from the person i am today.
  • s h s h s h s s h s s h h s h s s h s h s s s h s s h s h (not quite alternating but definitely balanced)
• who i was ten years ago is different from today.
  • s s s s h s h s h s s s h (overwhelmingly shifted in the direction of unaccented syllables)

looking at these, the evolutionary trend is clear. we have been shifting away from alternating soft-hard speech patterns to one that is less-rhythmic and, perhaps more important for the purposes of poetry, less-balanced. the staggering majority of english is now spoken with far fewer accented syllables combined to form shorter, simpler sentences with far more words conveying meaning and fewer only communicating grammatical function (that, which, who, etc).

but formal poetry is typically prescribed in terms of its rhythm and structure to fit the english of the past. let’s take a look at a simple example, one of shakespeare’s.

• “to me, fair friend, you never can be old for, as you were when first your eye I eyed, such seems your beauty still.” (sonnet 104)
  • s h s h s h s h s h s h s h s h s h s h s h s h s h (perfect iambic meter)
• “dear friend, you are still as beautiful as the first time i saw you.” (not poetic, just standard modern speech)
  • s h s s h s h s s s s h s s h s (irregular meter, as is common in english spoken today)
• “your beauty, dear friend, is the equal of our first moment’s glance.” (modern poetic adaptation)
  • s h s s h s s h s s s s h s h (twice as many soft syllables as hard, a reasonable assumption in any modern poetic writing reflecting the shift in contemporary grammar, vocabulary and usage)

when we look at these examples, it becomes very clear what is wrong with teaching people to write in enforced forms. it could do one of two things. it could frustrate them and make them believe their poetry is using the language incorrectly, shifting them to writing in a form that is less-contemporary and more difficult for readers to understand, certainly not a desirable change. or it could make them dissatisfied with their actual poetry and convince them they’re not “talented-enough” for life writing poetry, even if it’s just an enjoyable pastime. forcing people to write these forms is nothing if not cruel and dangerous.

you may be thinking “that’s all well and good but we should teach people to read them, at least” and you’d be … well, you’d be wrong. because we write poetry based on the patterns we’ve learned in our lives. getting students to read formal poetry is both confusing as it’s not generally written in good, contemporary english and unhelpful as a model because they can make a choice and either choice is bad — they can write like that and end up with something that’s arcane in its structure and sound or they can write in contemporary language and the formal poetry is actually a learned-and-practiced error they have to intentionally ignore. either way it’s actually worse than useless — it’s harmful.

the other piece, of course, isn’t about rhythm. language is more than rhythm and meaning. the meaning is very different and we’ve now seen how much rhythm has shifted but there’s actually a third component and it’s vastly-different now from only a century ago and this has lead to a significant error even in most contemporary english-learning textbooks.

i’m sure you’ve seen or heard this sentence or something like it — “in english, statements have falling intonation while questions have rising intonation” and it’s actually completely and absolutely false for the vast majority of english. english, as a general rule, has flat intonation with a slight drop at the end. this includes questions. the only exception is implied questions, which have a barely-noticeable raised-inflection on the final syllable — this is actually more often not even raised, just an absence of the typical lowering at the end of the sentence to signify the implication of the question. let’s take a look at an example.

• you went to the store this morning.
• you went to the store this morning?
• did you go to the store this morning?

the first has only one inflection point — it drops slightly in pitch on the final syllable. the second also has one — it goes up slightly on the same, final syllable to indicate it’s a question without a inquiry-marking word or inverted structure. the third, with its inverted, question-form structure, duplicates the intonation pattern of the first, not the second. the last syllable of the third example is lower, not higher.

what you will notice if you listen to a recording of speech from a century or even a half-century ago is that english had dramatic shifts in intonation during regular conversation. people spoke with rising and falling tone as a general rule even as late as the 60s and 70s. by the time the 80s and 90s came, though, most tonal variation had disappeared from the language — and this is a progression that began around the time of the second-world-war. a hundred years ago, even more two-hundred years ago, the general wisdom about questions with rising-intonation was actually true. this has been the impact of a modernizing force in english and a subduing of the tonal, lyric pattern over generations to simplify and streamline speech. english is now spoken much faster than it once was and it is far easier to speak quickly when tonal shifts are minimized — you will notice the same pattern in modern mandarin, for example — chinese languages used to have more tonal variation in terms of number of potential tones and the shift between the different tones was significant. a mandarin-learner will often find it hard to tell the difference at first between tones because the difference has become far more subtle compared to what it was in past centuries and teachers often speak with exaggerated tonal differentiation to make it easier to learn and understand which is which.

traditional poetic forms are structured to take advantage of the tonal and rhythmic patterns of their original languages. the sonnet was, for example, an italian form coming from a language that has huge tonal variation and very balanced rhythmic structure. this is why it was so quickly-adopted in english, a language that, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, shared those characteristics. it doesn’t now.

there are a few exceptions to this, of course. some forms don’t require strict rhyme or rhythm — the haiku, ge, ghazal or sijo (from japan, china, india and korea in that order). these don’t have the same negative traditional implications of sonnets and rhyming couplets. teaching children to rhyme or undergraduates to compose in meter, however, has no merit in a contemporary educational setting and encourages poor use of language, negative self-image in a linguistic and compositional context and provides vast numbers of counterexamples to sabotage the automated pattern-formation that is the hallmark of writing poetry.

perhaps these things are not clear to those teaching or learning these traditional methods — in the case of the teachers, i suspect this is because these were far less important when they were students because much of the shift that has occurred in english has happened in the time since they were children and they may not have realized its significance. for students, they don’t know better yet and it’s like they’re young children being taught a healthy diet consists of ice-cream every day, twice on tuesdays. unless someone tells them — and who’s going to do that but their instructors, who are generally just as clueless on this point, as likely on many others — they’ll believe they’re getting the best possible training in poetry.

so it’s time we stopped accepting the norm of standard poetry — both in literature and writing. our schools need to modernize and adapt their english teaching to the daily use of contemporary language rather than pandering to the desires of conservative, traditional and historic arcana. i hope this has been enlightening. may your poems be full of beautiful images. and may you think before you write.

[estimated reading time 17 minutes]

don’t do it yourself. seriously. buy ikea furniture.

i know what you’re thinking. i’m a woodworker. for fuck’s sake, i’m a woodworking teacher with decades of experience. i can build anything. ok, i don’t do roofs and tend to avoid boats cause they’re a lot of effort and i don’t go to sea. but i can, in theory, build anything. but i don’t. and my suggestion is, if you are seriously about making your life about woodworking, you don’t either. especially at first. this doesn’t apply quite so much if you’re doing this as a hobby and that’s what you want it to remain. but even then i think we have, as a society, gotten the wrong approach to this — the maker movement has done amazing things for educating people but it’s made people proud and anal about doing everything themselves and that’s rarely the best solution to a problem.

i’ll give you an example. i’m competent with wiring and framing. not expert by any stretch but competent. i could wire a house or frame a room. i could plaster the walls and put up the trim and paint the thing. but i could spend that time in the shop building something. now, if that piece is for my house, it’s worth nothing to me except the opportunity-cost. let’s say it’s a bookcase. if i go to ikea and buy a cheap bookcase, it might cost me fifty bucks. great. it’ll fall apart in a few years but that’s not my concern. i can get it very cheaply now. so if i spend a week in the shop making it and choose to pay professionals to do the tasks in my house, my actual cost is the whole cost of the materials plus the cost of the workers in my house and my benefit is saving fifty bucks. if, however, i am making that same bookcase for a client and they’re paying me five-hundred dollars to build it from a hundred dollars worth of wood, there’s a good chance i’m far closer to breaking even or perhaps making profit — by the time i pay a professional to do the work in my house, it’s going to be some serious money but i’m making money, too. my opportunity cost is high (paying the worker) but my offset is high, too (being paid for my own time and effort, having swapped time doing stuff in the house to save on expert costs for time in the shop making the piece). i think this is a reasonable tradeoff. and the work in the shop is the same — just as rewarding, just as fun, just as relaxing. but instead of losing five hundred dollars, i’ve broken even. of course, this is just an example. i could tell you, based on this, to rethink the equation that’s turning your workshop into a money-sink and meaning you have to keep delaying working on projects around the house just because you’re “a diyer” — i’m not one of those. not at all. but i won’t do that.

i have reasons — five of them, which i believe makes a great title if you care about seo — though i write only for the enjoyment of my readers and enlightenment of my students so i don’t really care about strangers stumbling across my articles in their google searches and those are usually the ones who send me emails about enlarging parts of my anatomy i don’t actually possess. my five reasons…

• pressure
• obsession and detail
• cost and reward
• publicity
• practicality

let’s think through them together.

pressure

pressure comes from all possible directions but there are really three — internal, partnership and temporal. not tempura. that’s deep-fried fish. there’s not much pressure there when you’re in the shop. temporal like “time”. i know. creating adjectives in english is weird. it’s why i’m a poet. cause working with english is like fitting a curved mortise-and-tenon while riding an elephant in a windstorm wearing a blindfold. it’s a pink elephant. but you don’t notice. why? have you already forgotten you’re wearing a blindfold? i hope you pay more attention when you’re in the shop. try not to cut off your fingers. if you don’t notice pink elephants and being blindfolded, this might be a bad hobby for you. i’d suggest something less involved. like competitive napping.

internal pressure

i have to get this done. i made a commitment. it has to be perfect and last forever. because this is an heirloom piece. i can’t use pocket-holes. it has to be done only with handtools. even a brace-and-bit cause electricity comes when you plug an extension cable from your soul into the devil’s asshole. and i’ll be horrendously disappointed in myself for not getting this perfect, on time. but every mistake i make is going to be pointed out to exactly a-hundred-and-seventy-three-percent of my guests in case they think i’m actually good at this. can’t have pride cause that comes before a fall. and that’s when the leaves show up…

you see the problem.

if you’re building for someone else, the pressure only comes from them. of course you want to get it right but they know what it looks like and how it works, not how it was built. they don’t honestly care how it was built. there being a gap in a mortise that’s covered by the mating-piece? they won’t see it and as long as you don’t mention it (don’t even fucking think of mentioning it — ever) they won’t know it’s there. you’ll know. if it’s your piece, you’ll never let yourself forget it. and you’ll know you didn’t take the inside-back-panel up to 400-grit when you were sanding. but they won’t even ask — and wouldn’t care if you told them. there’s pressure but it’s dramatically less.

you are the most critical audience for your skills. we all do it. we push ourselves to be better and throw limitless insults in our own direction regardless of how much progress or skill we manage to accumulate. as humans, we want to improve. and the best way to improve is to recognize our limitations. but the best way to feel good about ourselves is to see our accomplishments and recognize them as significant. you’re not going to get that if you’re the target audience. we’re programmed to be self-critical. build pieces for someone else. you’re a shitty client if you’re the one building it. you’ll never be satisfied.

know what else? you won’t pay yourself enough.

partnership pressure

this isn’t really what it sounds like. most of what we think of “partnership pressure” actually comes from inside. the best way to explain this is to give a short example. i call this the stop-my-wife-from-going-to-ikea example.

you need a new dresser. your wife (or husband but i know most of my woodworking students and readers are dudes and most dudes have wives but i’m not being exclusive here — just pragmatic for comprehension and simplicity) says “we need a new dresser — i’m going down to ikea to pick one up and i’ll be about a hundred dollars, maybe a little more — want to come?” and you reply “i’m a woodworker — i’ll build us a new dresser”.

she’s skeptical. but you beat her down over an hour or two and convince her it will only cost a couple of hundred dollars in lumber and take a couple of weeks and you’ll have a new dresser. of course, she wants a new dresser this afternoon and wants to spend half that money. and, if you’re honest, you also want a new dresser this afternoon for a hundred dollars, don’t you? i mean, given the choice, you’d be finished and it would have cost you far less. but that’s not realistic and you’re building an heirloom piece by hand with handtools and no devil’s-ass-electrons and … anyway, three months go by and you’ve spent six-hundred bucks on lumber, nineteen-million hours in the shop, it’s not going well, you’ve ruined a bunch of boards and your day-job has had you working flat-out and your wife says to you “i think i’ll just go down to ikea and get a cheap dresser so we have somewhere to put the clothes that’s not a suitcase until you get that thing finished, ok?” and you say… well, what do you say? if it was me, i’d say “great! fantastic! that’s a wonderful idea!” and there would be no sarcasm or irony in it. not even a little.

why? because she wasn’t the one putting pressure on you to do it in the first place. she didn’t care if it was handmade or heirloom or “done the right way” or traditional-ish or whatever. she doesn’t give two flying fucks about the joinery method or the new tooth-geometry of your backsaw you’ve been experimenting with. she just wants a place for her clothes. and yours. and i bet you want that, too.

so i hear people say things like this all the time — “you want to be a woodworker so look around your house and find the thing you need and make that”. it’s shitty advice. look around your friends and see what they might want. make that. don’t make stuff for yourself. definitely don’t make stuff your wife wants. that’s what shopping is for. if it’s for your house, buy it and you’ll have it today. if it’s for someone else, give a reasonable estimate of cost and time — don’t say “this will take me a thousand hours but i’ll tell her it’ll be two weeks cause that’s the only way she’ll let me build it”. be honest with yourself and everyone else about what’s likely to happen. it’s the only way you’ll ever actually be able to be calm. and working under pressure is unsafe and destroys all the fun of the thing — and it’s supposed to be fun, isn’t it?

your projects don’t have to be for-profit. if your friends want some furniture, make sure they already have some. if they have a dresser they’re not satisfied with, even if it takes you six months to build it, it’s not a problem. if their house has no furniture, don’t go there unless this is your actual legit job and you’ll have it all ready quickly. you don’t necessarily have to make them pay two grand for their new dining-table. maybe you just make it and they pay for the wood and you give them your time for free because you love being in the shop. but if they’ve already got a table that works and they’re looking to upgrade, they’ll be happy, you’ll be happy and your wife? well, she’ll be happy all the way home from ikea because — guess what! — you’ve got a dresser and there’s no pressure.

temporal pressure

this is the root (yes, i know, trees and roots — it’s not a very creative pun but i know someone’s going to point it out) of most of the pressure. you set a deadline and you try to stick to it. but you’ve been unreasonable about it. let’s say you get to spend ten hours in the shop every week. cause you work all the time and that’s an hour or so after work then maybe a few hours here and there on weekends. totally reasonable. but if you’re building serious furniture ten hours doesn’t go very far. i mean, it might take you two of those hours just to set up your new chisels and get your planes sharpened. you’ll probably take the better part of a week to even get the design mocked up on cardboard to make sure you’re heading in the right direction. if the project is going to take you six months to get finished, you have to be up-front about that.

but you probably weren’t. so you have a project that’s actually going to take three-hundred hours, which is thirty weeks at ten hours a week, but you’ve told someone (probably someone in your family) it’s going to be done in two months (like nine weeks or ninety hours) and that’s not practical. unless instead of working properly you cut all the corners and throw out the safety and start making something that’s so half-assed you’re starting to do more fractional arithmetic and you’re now measuring your finished projects rounded to the nearest sixteenth-of-an-ass.

so, much like partnership pressure, the issue here isn’t your working-speed. you don’t have to work faster. you just have to stop being stupid about overpromising. if it’s going to take a year, tell them it’ll be a year. they’ll either say “ok” or “no — that’s too long”. either way, it’s going to take a year and there’s nothing you can do about it. so there’s no need to cause yourself all the pressure. and this goes for all projects. it might be a victorian-style decorative chest. it might be a sheet-of-paper-sized kumiko panel for your bedroom wall. not all projects take the same amount of time. but be reasonable with your time-estimates. if you’re just beginning, take the time you think it’ll take, the time other people tell you it took them, add them together, triple it, round up and you’ll probably at least be in the ballpark. and approximate is fine. but when you say it’ll take a week and it takes six months people start to really whine at you. and again that destroys all your shop enjoyment. ain’t no pretty-little-woodcurls going to make you smile if you’re six months behind schedule on a one-week project, are they?

obsession and detail

mistakes are inevitable. you’ll make them. cut a board a few centimeters too short? we’ve all done it. cut the mortise on the wrong side? definitely been there. i’m not going to tell you you shouldn’t pay attention to detail. pay attention. always. pay serious, complete and undivided attention. while you’re at it, stop listening to loud music in the shop. it’s distracting and you can’t hear it when the machines start to strain under load or something is getting worn. i know. i’m guilty of this, too. chopping mortises while listening to the marriage of figaro isn’t an unusual sunday-morning pastime for me. but i have learned to turn down the volume and pay attention to my auditory surroundings.

that being said, though, there are details that matter and details that don’t.

if you’re building a piece for yourself, you want it to be perfect. actually, you’re going to be so obsessive about it being perfect you won’t let yourself get away with anything other than absolute perfection.

let’s take an example. you’re making a table with standard mortise-and-tenon leg-and-apron construction. i love these projects. they’re simple to design and build and so rewarding. and people love them cause they think tables are so impressive cause they’re so big. (it’s the big-friendly-giant effect — small things are cute. normal things are boring. big things are amazing.) so you have to cut tenons on the ends of your stretchers and mortises on two sides of each leg. you can do this. but here’s the thing. the tenons are completely hidden in the mortises and the mortises are completely hidden in the legs. if this piece is for you, i can see exactly what you’re planning to do. mark the whole thing on the boards precisely (this is a good step) then start cutting your tenons. you cut the tenons 5cm wide, 5cm long and 1cm thick. now you cut your mortises 5cm wide, 5cm long and 1cm thick. and they don’t fit together because (shock of shocks) they’re not perfect. now i’m all for perfection but this is a situation where perfect is unnecessary. let’s say you’re going to cut your tenons 5x5x1. only one of these dimensions matters — the long-grain face of the tenon. the 1cm dimension is too small to get any significant bonding strength (it’s not because of the grain type) and the floor of the mortise/end of the tenon is irrelevant because that’s never going to be smooth enough to get pressure and again it’s not enough surface area to be significant (don’t tell me endgrain glue is fine — it could be face-to-face glue here but it’s a tiny surface area so it doesn’t matter — the type of grain is irrelevant to whether you need contact). so what we’re ignoring is all the sides that are 1cm x 5cm (5 square centimeters of glue surface) and only focusing on the sides that are 5cm x 5cm (25 square centimeters of glue surface) because that’s where the strength of the bond comes from. so instead of cutting your mortise at 5x5x1, cut it at 5.5x5x1.5. now you can save the vast majority of your perfect-fitting time. and if you have to do eight mortises this means you have just saved two-thirds of your time (at least) on sixteen components being sized properly to fit. it’s way more than two-thirds because if you have three dimensions to correct you’re spending a lot of time trying to figure out which one is off. if only one can be off you just keep smoothing those surfaces until they mate smoothly and it’s done in seconds.

so be obsessive. focus on the details. but focus on the ones that matter. if you’re making stuff for your house, you’ll spend the rest of your life thinking about the things that are hidden, secret, irrelevant but not quite perfect. make it for someone else and they’ll never know, you’ll never remember and happiness will be the dominant feature in your woodworking life. remember why they call it a blind mortise? much like the mice in the story…

cost and reward

this is the other piece of the equation we looked at in the first example. if you’re making a piece for yourself, there’s no financial advantage.

i know what you’re thinking. “if i make this myself, i’m sticking it to the man and not buying their shitty factory-made bullshit disposable furniture.” yup. you can keep saying that. and i bet i’m still more of a communist, anti-capitalist, anti-consumerist than you. maybe not. but i make marx look positively-right-wing and i believe very strongly that profit and greed are the greatest sins in human existence. i’m not going to be arguing for making money any more than i’m going to be arguing for child-sacrifice on altars this weekend. here’s what really happens when you build stuff for yourself…

you think you’re going to build a bookcase that’ll last forever. you don’t want the $100 ikea one. cause it’s a waste of money and i’ll fall apart. so you go to the store and buy $300 of lumber, $500 of tools, $200 of glue, hardware, whatever, stuff you forgot you needed for your shop, etc. and you build it. and you think “yes i spent $1000 but it’s a bookcase i’ll keep for the rest of my life and it’s awesome and i love it”. and two years later you move and you need a different bookcase and that was one you made two years earlier and your woodworking skills have moved on and you see all the flaws and inaccuracies and you gave it to your neighbor for nothing. and yes you still have the $500 worth of tools but you’ve been meaning to replace a few of those planes with nicer ones and … oh, wait, you need a new bookcase so you’ll go down to the store and get some lumber but this time you’re going to do it right so you need better lumber and you need that new backsaw and … and … and … exactly. you’re not really sticking it to anyone. and consumer culture is alive and well. your sales-tax has just funded the building of a new casino and three new lanes on the interstate.

not that you shouldn’t buy nice lumber or good-quality tools. but please don’t think it makes you an anarchist. building your own stuff in our world isn’t going to change the way culture works. we still value things in our society by their novelty, how well they fit the trends of the moment and their aesthetic properties, not their usefulness. a perfectly-functional table that doesn’t look very good will be consigned to the dump but a poorly-made one that’s beautiful will sell in an instant. while all that glitters is certainly not gold, people aren’t looking for gold. they’re looking for gold-plated and we live in that world. you might be happy with your homemade furniture. but you’ll move and have to get rid of it. or you’ll get tired of it — i know you think it’ll make you happy forever but that’s only true if you don’t get better at woodworking and start to think “i should have done that better — i could do it so much better now — i’m so tired of looking at all these mistakes i made!” … and we all do that. i look at things from even a few years ago and think “i know what i’d have done differently that would make that piece awesome af” and … i give it away and make it again.

so what’s a better model? be reasonable about your prices. make stuff for friends. give them good deals. even just do it for free and have them buy the materials. your cost is nothing. your time is enjoyable. now you’re not paying to woodwork. you’re offloading all the cost on someone else and they’re happy cause they get beautiful furniture for a fraction of the price of actually paying for it at a custom shop. maybe they want a nice slab table. ok, they can go and get one for two-grand at the shop down in the artisans’ district. or you can take them to your local hardwood dealer and pick up a beautiful piece of 100mm-thick walnut for four-hundred. you ask them for a few hundred to pick up a better router and a flattening bit and another couple for the wood for the legs and construction lumber for a flattening jig. you might end up spending a little on consumables but look at what you’ve just done — you’ve provided your friend a beautiful piece of furniture, guaranteed yourself weeks of shop-time without the pressure of having to make something for yourself or your family that has a firm time-commitment attached and you’ve built up your tool inventory that you’ll be able to use for the next project. you’re happy. your family’s happy. your friend’s happy. and you’ve just accomplished a beautiful project and learned some valuable new skills you can probably charge real money for next time you use them. this is a better model. you’ve gone from t to gt in a single step. (if you don’t drive, this joke is lost on you. i’m sad for you.)

publicity

these last two reasons mostly work out to be the answer to simple questions — why are you woodworking? and what do you want to get out of your shop-time in return for what you put in? we’ll quickly tackle the first here. don’t worry. these aren’t afterthoughts but they’re not huge discussions.

you’re probably woodworking for one of three reasons…

• you love making things with wood
• you love designing and completing projects
• you want to make a career building things from wood and selling them

there are other potential reasons but i suspect, even if it’s another reason, at least one (and possibly more than one) applies.

if you love making things with wood, you need a continuous supply of projects. we’ve already seen why you, your wife and your immediate family are the worst possible clients you could be building for. you might still think it’s ok to make stuff for yourself but your house really only needs so many beds, bookcases and dining-tables. probably three or four, six or eight and one, maybe two, in that order. this won’t take you the next three or four decades to build. you’ll run out of stuff to make. so you’ll start making new versions and get rid of the old ones. and the cost will continue to be something you absorb. woodworking is only an expensive hobby if you’re the one paying for it.

if you love designing and completing projects, much the same thing will happen. this is the area i most-solidly fit in. i don’t actually like the process much — practically-speaking, it’s the teaching i enjoy more than the doing — but i love designing, prototyping, refining and finally seeing my designs in-real-life. it makes me smile every time. even if it takes me a month to get there — and i likely have more shop-time than most hobbyists for obvious reasons. i also don’t have children. thank fuck. or, as the case may be, thank no-fuck. but that’s a subject for another day. the upshot is you’ll have the same problem. you’ll run out of pieces to build and there are only so many times you can replace your dining-table before it starts to feel gratuitous.

if you want a career in woodworking, this is even more obviously a problem. make stuff for yourself?

well, the answer is word-of-mouth. whether you want to build things because you love the process, design and build because you love the outcome or make things for a living, you need a source of audience (clients). the only way you’re going to get this is by having people recognize that you’re a woodworker — not a hobbyist they come to when they break their chairs and footstools but someone who actually builds serious furniture they custom-request. you might do it on-the-cheap. you might do it on-the-free. or you might gradually start charging industry prices. whatever your financial model, this is a more sustainable way to do it. and if you start by making things for others you give them plenty of time to talk about it. their friends will notice their new furniture. they’ll ask.

you’ll start getting inquiries — a few at first but as you get hundreds of things out there in your local market i promise you’ll start hearing from more and more people. nobody’s more excited than to share their new, beautiful things. they’ll stick your work on instagram and facebook and talk about you on whatever platform that stupid bird is singing on this year. they’ll do your marketing. and marketing, even if you’re not trying to sell anything, is important. build for other people and it’ll probably cost them at least the value of the materials and you’ll get to do your hobby without all the overhead. it’s a win for everyone. make shit for yourself and it’s a loss for you, your bank-account and your stress-level.

practicality

from a practicality perspective, the question is what do you want to get from your shop-time? you know what you’re putting in. time, money, effort, practice, experience. the other side of the equation might just be enjoyment. it could be profit. it could be fame. maybe many things. but you need to have an answer to this question. you’re investing a lot — potentially, if you’re building for yourself, a shitload of money in tools and materials, possibly tuition and training, too. once you have an answer, you can try to figure out what the most sensible way to achieve it is with a reasonable amount of input.

let’s say you want enjoyment. does it matter to you who the piece is for? probably not. well, build it for someone else and let them shoulder the majority of the cost. same enjoyment, fraction of the financial commitment and the added benefit of helping someone else get something beautiful in their life.

what if you want profit? well, you’re going to have to build something to sell. that’s an easy one.

if you want fame, again you need lots of practice. that means more time in the shop. and the only way you’re going to be able to afford that is by making sure the financial outlay for each new tool purchase or trip to the hardwood-dealer or lumberyard doesn’t empty your bank-account.

i think the equation is pretty clear here. you want to minimize the financial side of the investment for the maximum possible outcome — enjoyment, money, whatever else you’re looking to get.

retreat?

woodworking as a hobby is a zero-sum game. you put in an investment of time, effort and money and get something else back. usually enjoyment. you might get profit but the really-important thing for most of us in the community here is to enjoy it. the problem is that we’ve been told it’s not just inherently-dangerous but unavoidably-expensive. and that’s simply not true. woodworking for most of us can be done relatively cheaply, even with nice, new tools and high-quality lumber. we’ve just been told we should treat this as an extension of the diy/maker movement and that’s a silly, unsustainable approach. we need to offload the expense on others and reward them for their support with our best work, producing the furniture they want for what should be a reasonable level of financial commitment from them. you might never charge anything more than the cost of materials for your projects — and that’s totally reasonable. but the cost of materials is often far more than you can afford to spend without them and far less than what they’d have spent going to anyone who’s charging them enough to put in time and make profit.

so you might never have thought about this equation of cost-to-enjoyment before. and now you have. my work here is done. may your woodcurls be happy, your bench be flat and your blades be screaming-sharp. thanks for reading!

[estimated reading time 7 minutes]

english has the most unnecessarily-complex spelling system of any modern language. while spelling is not necessarily-simple in many european languages, it is usually complex for a reason — mostly because the words are actually that long or have that many phoneme-groups in them. the letters usually represent how the word sounds. english, however, has a unique problem.

it’s not the evolutionary child of an ancient language with some other influences thrown in. it’s the child of two languages with competing spelling systems in approximately-equal quantities.

let’s think about where english came from.

english is the result of the language of the people (sort-of old german) being different form the language of the aristocratic and ruling class (close enough to old-french we can think of it that way). as these two pseudo-languages merged to create a new dialect, eventually a whole new language, they became less and less similar to the languages they derived from and closer and closer to what we now know of as english — a language that has no functional gender, german-influenced grammar and predominantly-french vocabulary — with many exceptions to these rules, of course.

in many cases, english has four words for the same thing — one each from french, german, latin and greek. almost everything has at least two, the french and german roots shifted to english. what this has done is created the largest language of borrowed-words that’s ever existed. nearly 100% of words in english aren’t just etymologically-related to words in other languages. they’re taken either completely or slightly-modified from their original forms.

what this has meant is that english didn’t create its own spelling or writing systems. it took those that already existed in german and french, the french being derived from latin but german having its own decidedly-unlatin version.

this wouldn’t be nearly as much of a problem if english had simply chosen one and used that, modifying words borrowed from other languages to fit its single writing-system. but it didn’t. it incorporated the french letters for french-derived words and most coming from latin and other romance languages. it used the german spelling-system for words from german, most of what came from greek and almost all eastern-language-derived words. the result is the mess we now call written-english.

let’s take a look at a few examples before we talk about it in more general terms so you can see the scope of the problem.

• knock
• muscle
• design
• column
• whistle
• knowledge

these words are pronounced, if you don’t already know…

• nohk
• mus-l
• duh-sin
• kawl-uhm
• uis-l

so what are we actually seeing here? k can be pronounced or not. c can be pronounced or not, sometimes as s and sometimes as sh, other times as k. w is sometimes a composite vowel, other times completely absent from the pronunciation. n can have a sound or be ignored, as can g.

the problem is not trivial. when trying to go from written english to speaking, how can a learner tell if the g in design is pronounced like the g in good or the g in high (as in, not pronounced at all). how can they know if the c in muscle sounds like the c in pick, car, church or scene (where it doesn’t actually appear on-scene at all, auditorily-speaking).

the process in the other direction is even more confusing. why is “column” not spelled “kolum” or “design” not spelled “desain”, “muscle” not “musl” and “knock” not “nok”? it’s not a logical answer — it’s simply tradition, linguistic history and an unwillingness to change — all, sadly, hallmarks of an english-speaking society. actually, spelling-reform and standardization is a huge part of the history of english. at the time of shakespeare, a massive spelling-modernization program made english a more-easily-written and somewhat-easily-read language compared to what it had been in the past, eliminating some of the historically-curious letters. but it’s never really had another organized reform since. compare that to french were government-backed spelling shifts have happened many times, the most recent being just thirty years ago. in german, an even-more-recent systematic reorganization of the language happened in 1996, making things far simpler for german students in the twenty-first century. english, though, hasn’t had a comprehensive reflection on its spelling in more than four-hundred years and it shows.

while the obvious answer is to scrap the outdated latin alphabet and shift to a featural writing system (i suggest a phoneme-supplemented version of hangul because it would be easier to adopt something that already exists — which english already did with the latin alphabet that had been around for millennia by the time english began to be written — than to create something completely new), an interim step might be easier for people to accept, especially the notoriously-uneducated english-language-native-speakers — this isn’t an opinion — english speakers speak their language less-precisely than any other native-speakers of modern languages. take your pick of the dozens of studies — whether this is simply disinterest (i suspect this is the majority of the reason) or because english-language schools actually don’t teach grammar as a general rule like schools teaching german, spanish, french, korean or chinese, focusing only on grammar in foreign-language-study courses and completely ignoring english, it’s hard to say and it’s likely a combination of these with other reasons.

so what can be done to simplify english.

first, the shift must be from “traditional” or “historic” spelling to standardize on phonemic spelling. what does that actually mean? words should be spelled how they sound, not as a reflection of their history or etymology. the word “scene”, for example, that we have just seen, has an extra “c” in it and a silent “e” at the end. english typically uses “ee” to represent “i” as a sound and that’s not nearly as much of a problem. but where does the “c” come from? it’s obviously not important because the same sound is represented by the word “seen”, the past of “see”. it comes from the older word “skene” (greek) that passed through latin as “scena” — by the time it reached latin, the c was already arcane and no longer pronounced. another example from our selected words that demonstrates it clearly is “design” — it comes from the latin “designare” whose root is “signum” — sign, as in something that demonstrates a meaning. in latin, the “g” is pronounced. by the time the word entered french as “désigner”, the g was irrelevant and “draw” in french adopted the same root and is spelled “dessiner” — no “g” at all. in english, the word would be just as comprehensible as “desin” without the “g” at all.

second, we must eliminate the unnecessary letters and ensure we have sensible patterns for composite sounds. “i” is used in english to signify neutral “ih”, pure “i” and grouped “ai” (among other things but these are the three main ones) — this can be seen in the words “sin”, “semi” and “sign”, just to use three simple and similar-looking examples. the problem in the other direction can be seen in the use of multiple letters to represent the same sound — “car” but “kit”, for example.

a more sensible set of constants doesn’t need to differentiate “c” from “k” or “s” — we simply need to decide which letter represents which sound and use it only for that. in this way, transcribing spoken english always has a single answer. the letters used are the only ones that make those sounds. and reading english is easy as every letter has a specific sound without exception.

once this has been done, shifting to a featural writing system is actually fairly simple because it involves no more than transliteration from one way of representing sound to another. while english persists in using many possible letters to represent each sound and many possible sounds to speak each letter, this transition to a modern writing-system is hopelessly complex and has to be done at the word-by-word level rather than simply running a series of letters through a basic algorithm.

taking some examples everyone already knows — “to”, “too” and “two”, “see” and “sea” or “there”, “their” and “they’re” — clearly demonstrates the potential confusion present in a language with flexible spelling that could be completely eliminated, removing a stumbling block for those who are trying to learn the language — but, as is very clear in the sheer volume of complaints about people misspelling words on the internet and the decibel-level of the hatred expressed in both directions, this isn’t just about students and most english-speakers simply can’t spell, either. it’s not because they’re stupid. it’s because the spelling is.

english learners, whether children or those learning as adults, have incredible difficulty with spelling yet it’s not just a question of education. this is an issue of social justice, too. we judge people for their ability to speak and write english clearly and correctly. if someone makes a spelling mistake, especially in an employment context, they are chastised and judged, often seen as unintelligent, despite the fact that spelling in english has nothing to do with logic or intelligence and everything to do with a history most minorities have been only on the receiving end of — particularly from a violence and discrimination standpoint.

keeping the current spelling system intact is simply an act of white-supremacy and maintenance of the status quo. inclusion doesn’t just mean encouraging equality in the workplace. it means removing the barriers created by unnecessary shame linked to things like education. while it is certainly important for everyone to be educated regardless of background or race, a society that judges people’s intelligence not on how well they can solve problems or complete tasks but the way they write words is decidedly-problematic. this is not about communication. there is a huge difference between judging someone for saying “i ain’t got nowheres to eat ma lunchtimes” (which is, admittedly, an awful assault on a language that is already painful to listen to) and “you sea, i got their just as the to others left hour table”. this sentence, while using the wrong spelling in several places, is completely comprehensible and has no structural or grammatical errors once the words are standardized to their common-spelling versions. if this person spoke an identical sentence, it would result in no shame — writing it, however, would likely result in judgment and an assumption of being both uneducated and unintelligent.

so english spelling is difficult and cumbersome, complex and arcane. it is all these things because it has simply not modernized and these historical anachronisms do nothing except stand in the way of those learning english or those not coming from a white-european background. don’t you think four-hundred years is a bit long for english to go without correcting these obvious and simply-repaired issues? thanks for taking a walk with me through the garden of metamorphic letters. may you have a day full of peaceful words.

[estimated reading time 5 minutes]

if you cut a lot of dovetails, there is a tool you may be missing from your kit — a fishtail chisel. of course, this might be old news to you as most of the modern manufacturers make one. the problem is, as always, that they’re brutally-expense. but we’ll get to that in a minute. first, let’s talk about why you might need one.

a fishtail chisel, as the name suggests, looks like a regular bench chisel of the same size but, instead of having a blade that’s straight along its length, it has two rounded notches cut in the side. this varies by brand, of course, but it looks vaguely like you pinched the chisel perhaps a centimeter behind the cutting edge and squeezed it hard enough to thin the blade to a small fraction of its full width. the effect of this is to make a chisel shaped like a very aggressive dovetail when viewed on its face.

of course, there are actually fairly few times when you need a chisel like this. if you cut a lot of through-dovetails, this isn’t an issue. a standard flat bench-chisel will clean the insides without any problem. but if you cut half-blind dovetails or any other angled-recessed joinery you’ll probably have noticed it’s difficult to clean the waste from the inside corners because the thickness of the chisel keeps it from getting close enough for the last tiny bit of paring — either from the edge or face direction.

what the fishtail profile does is allow the chisel to get close to that inside corner without the rest of the blade making contact with the angled portion of the joint — it’s designed specifically to allow undercutting, which is part of making half-blind joints.

this is realistically a single-use tool but it’s a very important thing to do to get your half-blind dovetails to seat properly and can save you a huge amount of time and frustration. what’s the alternative? well, there are two.

one is you can use a skew-chisel with a very acute angle. this will allow you to get in the corner but it’s far more difficult to do it with that sharp point. and, if you are cleaning both sides of a dovetail, you might find it easier with a pair of skew-chisels, one skewed in each direction. of course, if you’re buying new, commercial skew-chisels, this doesn’t save your budget anything.

the other is to use a long, flexible knife to trim the waste right in the corner. this definitely works but it’s easy to break a disposable knife this way or bend a non-disposable one. you’re realistically using a tool not very-well-suited for the task at hand.

but you’re in-luck. for a tool you only use for a few seconds when you’re cutting one specific joint, the nearly-hundred-dollar pricetag feels unreasonable. don’t get me wrong — i have no problem spending serious money on a nice chisel. veritas, lie nielsen and various japanese makers will certainly encourage me to part with vast quantities of my hard-earned currency. but for something i’m not really going to use much or often, i am very hesitant. and when it’s something that doesn’t even have to be good to be useful, i’m not really interested in cashing in when i can just have something far more useful for what i save.

the solution is to convert a standard, vintage bench-chisel to a fishtail profile. and this will take you only a few minutes with things you probably already have in your shop. you’ll need a drill (seriously — are there any woodworkers out there without a drill?), a dowel, some sandpaper, glue, a long bolt and a cheap chisel in your desired width. let’s get started.

grind your chisel but don’t bother to sharpen it. put tape over the edge because, even without being sharp, it’ll still cut you if you’re not careful. and i’m not that careful — if you are, you can skip the safety precaution but for ten seconds and a piece of tape i suggest your fingertips don’t need to bleed today. your choice, though.

grab a wide piece of dowel-stock maybe 40-60mm long and a bolt long enough to go all the way through your piece with at least 50mm sticking out the end. drill a hole through the center of your dowel — yes, be precise — if it’s not centered you’re going to have a nightmare when it comes to using it. put some quick-set epoxy on the bolt and shove it through the hole then let it dry. when that’s done, stick the shaft of the bolt in your drill and make sure it spins properly. it should unless you made a rather strange error at this point.

use your quick-set epoxy to glue coarse sandpaper to the entire round surface of the dowel. when it dries, you’ve got yourself a rotary sander. you can just buy one of these if you want to skip the steps to here and you can often pick one up for a couple of bucks but not everyone wants to do that so this is how you make one rather quickly.

with that spinning in your drill, clamp the drill to your bench — i use a vise but you can just use clamps if you don’t have a vise. wait a second — you don’t have a vise? this may not be the time to make a fishtail chisel. this might be a time to make a vise. ok. no more tangents. make sure you can run the drill without it moving. now take your bench-chisel and slowly press it against the spinning wheel so the end of the blade ends a few millimeters from the point where the circle comes out the side. if the steel gets warm, stop for a few seconds for it to cool. don’t rush. when you get one side done, do the other side. you should end up with a profile that looks like this…

this is not the traditional profile for a fishtail chisel but it should be perfectly-fine for what you’re doing. you can always grind another half-circle of use a metalworking file to take away more steel and taper the whole thing back to the shaft or the handle. but what you’re trying to do is get the walls of the blade away from where they can interfere with your dovetail sockets and a circle with a 40mm diameter is likely to do it. if you do bigger dovetails, use a bigger dowel or file back more of the edge once you have the shape in.

one of the nice things about doing this with an old chisel is you can usually pick those up for only a few bucks so if you mess it up you haven’t really lost anything. yes, there is definitely a risk of warping or snapping the chisel but, having done this many times, i’ve never encountered it. the theoretical risk exists but you’re practically keeping 6-8mm in the center of the blade and that’s definitely strong enough. don’t worry too much if the fishtail profile isn’t centered. it doesn’t matter. you’re not using this to actually shape anything, just to clean waste from one side or the other. the handle being exactly in the middle of the tail is irrelevant to its usefulness, though it does look nice if you’re careful so you should probably at least try to get the two sides to match fairly closely.

once that’s done, simply hone an edge on your new fishtail-chisel exactly the same way you do a bench-chisel — it is, practically-speaking, just a bench-chisel that’s been pinched really hard by some overwhelmingly-strong fingers, after all.

i think i’ve had three people ask me about fishtails this week alone so it seems to be on everyone’s minds lately. hopefully this has at least given you something to think about and maybe you, too, can have a fishtail in your shop and no longer just have the spirits of the trees keeping you safe but have suijin (水神 — mythical water spirit) on your side? whatever you’re working on today, i hope it goes … swimmingly. thanks for taking the time to dive into this with me.