Do You Get It?

What an opportunity! This month BAWA is having an extravaganza of focusing on hand tool use -- specifically handplanes. First our regular meeting on Thursday night will be all about handplanes. You'll see how much easier it is to work with when the blade is sharp, and the body is tuned. Then on the following Saturday, July 23rd, you can bring your own planes to a sharpening/tuning workshop. Why? So you can get the concept of how important it is to have the skill of working with hand tools, and what this will do for your designs. When we toured member Jerry Robinson's shop last month and looked at the beautiful furniture he had made, it was obvious that he "gets it," as you could easily see the results of this knowledge. Member Arnie Champagne, who runs a school on fine woodworking where he teaches hand tool skills, "gets it." Just look at the craftsmanship of the pieces he brings to Show & Tell at our meetings. Member Yeung Chan, a nationally known furniture maker and teacher obviously "gets it," heck, he wrote a book about it: Classic Joints with Power Tools shows you how to create "joints that took our forebears days to construct with hand tools can be made by you [with power tools] in a few hours." In the introduction to his book Yeung goes on to say, "As much as machines may speed up the process, I believe that modern woodworking is still a balance of using power tools and hand-tool skills." He goes on to say, "Hand skills provide the details and let you impart great craftsmanship with a personal touch."

This argument of hand-making versus machine-making reminds me of the controversy that raged in the field of architecture over the last twenty years. As we started to use computers to do 2-D drafting of construction drawings, some of us worried about the draftsmanship of pencil on paper being lost, and the effect this would have on how buildings would look. Drafting by hand was an craft that developed only after years of experience. It grew out of sketching, or "thinking with a pencil" that created that brain-arm-hand-eye coordination skill set that led to well done drawings being seen as works of art in and of themselves. Then computers advanced to a point where today, young people drafters no longer know how to sketch, let alone draft. Many of us argued that care should be taken to continue to teach hand drafting skills to students. We were that being able to "think graphically?", that is to say, form on paper an expression of the idea in ones head by using the muscle memory and eye hand coordination of a skill set that had been built up with patient repetitive practice was a necessary pre-requisite to successful building design and drafting. We saw that without it, the way buildings look would surely change -- and we weren't sure this would be for the better.

Well this has come to pass. Today's graduates don't have the skill set to put pencil to paper for drafting or for designing. It's all done with the computer -- and, sure enough we're getting some radically different looking buildings; where no walls are straight or parallel, or where the building envelope becomes a thin skin of undulating metal that would have been impossible to draw just a few years ago. Think the Disney Performing Center in LA. The point is that buildings designed and drafted totally on the computer often look different than all the buildings of millennia before. We've lost this battle, and the absence of this skill is forever changing the field of architecture. It's too soon to say that this is a change for the better. The architectural theorists have moved the argument on to what style these new things are. Notice they're not arguing whether or not these new buildings are beautiful, in the traditional sense of the word.

Similarly, in woodworking, the absence of the basic skill set of working with hand tools has changed the look of modern, mass-produced, commercial furniture. And again the beauty is lost. It's possible today to design an entire piece on the computer and build it with CNC machines and the like, such that the hand-eye thing never gets involved. The result is that the piece doesn't engage the senses (or the same senses) in the ways that pieces of "hand worked wood" do when created with more traditional methods. Note that Yeung and many of us are not saying, hand tools pure and good, machines (like routers, bandsaws, etc.) bad. Instead, we're saying you can't create really beautiful pieces, ones that engage the senses without this involvement of the eyes, hands, and heart of the maker. And that the machinery should just serve to speed up the process -- the maker still has to be skilled in hand tool use.

Yet, I'm willing to bet that most of us came to BAWA and to the hobby and craft of woodworking during a process of looking for a way of satisfying our senses. In the modern world our senses are starved for the "handmade." With our appetite for the latest gee whiz tool (I include myself here), many of us forget that the beauty of the handmade comes from the development of basic skills of working with hand tools. So like the rest of us, real tool-junkies are actually still searching for how to produce a work of beauty to be admired by all. And these guys actually use their tools to produce woodworking that is still using this brain-to-eye-to-hand thing resulting in a handmade piece that others will say is beautiful, because they instantly recognize the craftsmanship inherent in the piece.

Sharp hand tools are a prerequisite for developing any proficiency with hand tools. Jay van Arsdale's presentation at our May meeting drove this home. So through all of these routes, BAWA is trying to send you the message of how very, very important hand tools are to achieve the balance that Yeung talks about. Respond to the call, and attend both sessions this month. You'll find your skills will jump up a notch, and there may even be some cross-learning or breakthroughs in other areas of your woodworking too!