Checking Diagonals During a Glue Up
I can still smell the stale, sweet scent of PVA glue and the metallic tang of those old Bessey clamps from a Tuesday afternoon in 2004. I was working on…
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Posting Process Without Performing
I spent most of my morning staring at a pile of rejected chair joints—walnut scraps that didn’t quite meet the tolerance I demanded—and feeling a deep, physical resentment toward the…
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Choosing a Joint for Load and Look
I have a shelf in the back of my studio, tucked behind the letterpress, filled with what I call the “ghosts.” They are the scraps of walnut and oak that…
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Which Joint I Cut First
I was staring at a pile of expensive walnut stock, my hands shaking slightly, realizing I’d just cut the tenons on a drawer front that was now mathematically impossible to…
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A Sprung Joint and Why
I was standing over a piece of walnut last Tuesday, staring at a bevel that looked more like a topographical map of the Andes than a clean line, wondering why…
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The Mistake That Multiplies
I can still smell the sawdust and the sharp, metallic tang of a miscut aluminum rail from a project back in ’04. I was staring at a series of expensive,…
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Repair as an Argument About Value
I was clearing out a corner of the studio last Tuesday when I tripped over a prototype chair from 2004—a failed experiment in bentwood that I’d kept simply because the…
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Standing Next to Someone Who Knows
I remember sitting in a dusty workshop in my early twenties, watching a master joiner spend forty minutes adjusting a single tenon that looked, to my untrained eye, perfectly fine.…
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Designing So the Wood Can Move
I can still hear the sound of that walnut tabletop splitting—a sharp, dry crack that echoed through my studio like a gunshot. It was three in the morning, and I…
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You Cannot Learn It From a Book Alone
I was staring at a stack of technical drawings for a walnut dining chair last Tuesday—drawings so precise they could have been etched by a machine—and I realized they were…
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