I stopped under an oak out at Pheasant Branch the other morning. Big one. A hundred and twenty feet, maybe four feet through. The kind of tree that makes you feel temporary. Pheasant Branch is one of my regular walks. I go for the shade as much as anything. I’m fair-skinned enough that the sun…
The top and its two breadboard ends sat on the assembly table for a week. Not a long time. I want to be honest about that, because in my head it had become this looming thing I was dodging, and it was seven days. But I knew, the whole seven days, that I wasn’t going…
The clamps were on and the glue was already spread when I figured out something was wrong. Seven boards of cherry, a little over an inch and a half thick, six feet long, forty five inches across when they were all together. This is the dining room table, the one I’ve mentioned here a few…
Not much woodworking in this one. Fair warning. It’s the one I needed to write this week. Normal service resumes shortly. Most afternoons around two o’clock I make a decision, and I make it so fast it doesn’t feel like one. There’s paperwork on my desk. There’s a gym I pay for. I stay at…
I’m a lazy woodworker. I say that out loud in the shop and people usually laugh, because they think I’m being modest. I’m not. I mean it as a description of how I work and, most days, as a compliment. In 1992 I was out with Genesis on a stadium tour, running lights and calling…
A few years ago I cut one dovetail joint a day for ninety days. Pine, because it’s cheap and it cuts easy. The first ones took me an hour. By the end I was down to fifteen or twenty minutes, laying one out and cutting it without thinking much about it. I stacked them on…
My grandmother taught me to drive on the dirt roads of East Texas, in an old International Scout, threading between trees and stumps and ditches on trails that barely counted as roads. Her theory was simple. If I could keep that Scout out of a ditch on a rutted trail, avoiding cars on the interstate…
The most common thing I hear at the Joinery isn’t about a tool. It’s some version of “I don’t know what to build,” and close behind it, “even if I knew, I couldn’t design it.” People say it like it’s the wall between them and the shop. For years I’d answer by pointing them at…
In a lot of organizations right now there’s a quiet double standard about AI. Using it to write code is fine. Encouraged, even. Using it to write a song, make an image, or punch up a piece of copy is treated as something closer to cheating. Same tool, two verdicts. I’m not a software engineer…
