Individualists Unite!

After a woodworking course, this student has tools, a chest – and friends.

In spring 2016 I took my first woodworking course, an “Introduction to Hand Tool Woodworking.” The class promised to teach students to fix up some tools and build a tool chest – but I learned more than that.

Mike Siemsen, of “The Naked Woodworker” infamy, taught the course, and for a week in June I was one of a dozen students camped out on his rural Minnesota lawn. We’d brought mismatched kits of tools: new, old, cheap, high-end. We were a mismatched bunch – an East Coast journalist and her surfing New York-lawyer husband, an Air Force officer, a Mandan Indian roughneck and his survivalist son, a food co-op clerk, a grad student, a recently quit-his-job photography professor and a pair of architects – but we all wanted to make things out of wood. And we didn’t know how to start.

So we did – we started. And we suffered. Like most old things, our old tools needed some reviving. That first day, we wore holes in our thumbs on plane totes. We ground century-old steel and squinted over saw blades. We moved arms and bodies back and forth until enough life had gone into our dying tools to bring them back to usefulness.

We also learned to trust our hands, take a firm grip and push metal into spinning rock. To ask for help and to just keep going. To not look for shortcuts. Often, Mike pointed out our foolishness, then helped us overcome it.

The second day, we started using our tools. Shavings spilled out of the planes, piling up around us. We found the rhythm of all good learning. Mike would explain, demonstrate. We would step back to our benches to try it, and find ourselves challenged. We’d ask neighbors, puzzle out a measurement or layout together and ask for reminders on the next step. Slowly, the pieces of our chests emerged. We had lids, sides and tills. We cut rabbets, nailed the thing together, added cleats and beckets.

On Thursday, Mike showed us how to cut dovetails for our tills. I’d never tackled this, but Mike deflated my fear: He cut his sample dovetails with a hacksaw and a sharpened screwdriver. His marking gauge was a screw in a block of wood. He told us that an earnest student once asked a teacher, “What sort of pencil are you using?” The teacher had glared and answered, “A pencil!” Point taken. Don’t blame your tools.

But away from the benches, something else happened: We got to know each other. Evening sweats in the hand-built sauna helped people get comfortable – Mike’s not called the naked woodworker for nothing. Breakfast morphed from silent food intake to witty political sparring matches. Banter filled the shop. Jokes piled up faster than shavings.

The thing about making stuff is that it sets you free. Not free as in being able to do what you want – our days were ordered, and we worked our skin off to get everything milk painted by Friday. But we were following an ancient tradition of making stuff, and making stuff sets you free from worrying over what other people will think – if your chest works, it’s good work. We weren’t fetishizing the past, just building a chest that looked nice and would last.

(I gave my chest to my brother for his wedding present. He and his wife keep it at the foot of the bed, and it holds zero tools. I have no idea what’s in it – probably board games.)

This newfound freedom yielded us more than tools and a chest. We gained a community – we grew up as woodworkers and as friends. –Daniel Clausen 

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in the June 2017 issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine.