Half of Woodworking
Every night I sit in my living room and look across at a whiskey cabinet I built. People who come over tell me it’s beautiful, and I think it is too. It’s a dovetailed case, and somewhere up on top I pared out the wrong side of a tail and left a gap. It sits on the top of the case, so once the cabinet is on the wall nobody will ever see it. I can’t see it either, not from my chair. But I know it’s there. So most nights I end up looking at the one thing in that cabinet I’d change, while everyone else in the room is looking at the cabinet.
In my classes I tell people that half of woodworking is recovering from your mistakes. I believe that. Some days I’d put it higher than half.
The reason mistakes feel so heavy in this craft is that the material isn’t free. A board you ruin is money, and it’s also the hour you already spent milling it flat and square. When a cut goes bad, some part of your brain does the math on both at once and decides the day is over. I’ve thrown tools down. I’ve walked out of the shop and not come back for two weeks. That was the Maloof-style rocking chair I built for my wife. I knocked it off the bench, broke a leg, and announced out loud that I was finished with woodworking. I’ve told that whole story on the blog, so I won’t run it again, except to say I wasn’t finished. I just meant it for about two weeks.
What took me a long time to understand is that the recovery isn’t a tax on the work. It is the work. The cut that goes wrong and the half hour you spend figuring out how to save the piece, that’s woodworking. Most of it, honestly. Anyone can follow a cut list on a day when nothing goes sideways. The skill is in what you do the moment it does.
There are really three things you can do with a mistake, and knowing which one you’re looking at is its own skill. You can rebuild the part, you can repair it, or you can leave it.
You rebuild when the mistake is structural, or when it’s somewhere people will actually see. If that dovetail gap had landed on the front corner of the case at eye level, I’d have cut a new board and started the joinery over, no argument. A visible flaw on a piece you’re proud of will eat at you in a way that’s not worth the afternoon you saved.
You repair when the thing is fixable and the fix will hold. When I broke the leg on that rocking chair, it was a clean break. Sam Maloof himself sent sketches of how he’d repair it. I didn’t do it his way, it was a lot of work, but I did fix it, and it held. You’d have to know exactly where to look.
And you leave it when nobody will see it and it doesn’t threaten the structure. Which brings me back to the cabinet. The gap is on top, hidden by the wall and the way the thing hangs. The joint is sound. So I left it. By every rule I just gave you, leaving it was the right call.
The thing that makes any of this bearable is that I treat every piece I build as a prototype. I’ve used that word about my own work for years, and I don’t mean it the way a product company means it, where the prototype is the rough draft before the real one. I mean the piece is a way to find something out. What the wood does. What the joint does, and what I do when it goes wrong. The rocking chair I keep bringing up is a prototype. I’ll never build another one, not because it failed but because building it told me what I needed to know. It works, and my wife sits in it. A prototype you only make once is still a prototype. The learning was the product.
So this is where I’m supposed to tell you it all resolves. Own your mistakes, the imperfection is what makes it handmade, the flaw is character. I do tell people that, and I’ve watched a customer’s face change when I point out a flaw and explain it and the flaw becomes the reason they love the thing. That’s real. It happens.
And I still sit in my living room every night and see the dovetail.
Both of those are true at the same time, and I’ve stopped waiting for one to cancel the other. I can know, completely, that the gap doesn’t matter, that nobody sees it, that the cabinet is good. And I can still see it. That might just be the maker’s half of the deal. The person you built it for gets the cabinet. You get the cabinet and the gap. Nobody’s been cheated. It’s only that you’re the one carrying the full inventory of the thing, every choice you made and every place you’d do it differently.
Eight years ago I had my son Simon at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking. He was ten or eleven, building a veneered memory box, and doing well. Marc Adams came by and asked how it was going, and Simon started listing everything he’d done wrong, this gap, that seam, the veneer that didn’t quite line up. Marc looked at the box and said it looked like professional work. Then he asked Simon if he knew the difference between a professional and an amateur. Simon didn’t. Marc told him the amateur points out his mistakes. The professional charges more for them.
It was mostly a joke. But it stuck with me, and I notice I’ve just spent the better part of a thousand words pointing out my own. By Marc’s definition that makes me the amateur in the room, which after forty years is either funny or a little humbling depending on the night. I’m fine with it. I’m not a professional woodworker and I don’t want to be. I’d rather be the guy who still sees the dovetail. The day I stop seeing it is probably the day I’ve stopped paying attention.
