I have spent a good part of the past five years* teaching woodwork. As most teachers probably find, I have learnt as much as my students have. In fact, I am moved to say that if you seriously wish to learn, for example, how to cut a better dovetail, the most efficient way to improve yourself is to attempt to teach someone else how to do it. The great thing about teaching is that you are quickly forced to confront a lot of things that you otherwise might easily ignore, avoid or simply be unaware of.
In order to teach someone how to cut dovetails, you need to work out a procedure. Just about any book on woodwork will give a version of this. If you follow the recipe of a how-to book, you will end up with a dovetail at the end, but chances are it won’t be a really good one. So what have you done wrong? Usually you will look in vain for the equivalent of the trouble-shooting guide common in car manuals: ‘if you have an even gap under all the tails, check the following…’
When you start to look for what you have done wrong, you will eventually also start to think about how you might go about the work so as to minimse the chances of that mistake happening again. Once you start doing this you have entered the world of technique. This word encompass the way you choose, use and prepare tools and wood, which work methods you adopt, how you organise your workspace, and even the fathomless world of mental attitude (Robert Pirsig, in his marvellous book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, began: ‘Assembly of Japanese motorcycle require great peace of mind…’)
Over time, as we work we build up a collection of knowledge, procedures, tricks of the trade, mental notes, methods of working, hard experience and so on, as well as a level of skills with our tools. If we are disciplined enough all this adds up to a particular way of working, our own individual approach to doing the various woodworking tasks that confront us. It is this that I refer to as our technique.
There are three things that need to be said immediately about technique. The first is that technique is somehting that evolves. You can begin with a technique that you learn from someone else. This was the old way, where apprentices learn from their masters and, by doing so, stood on the shoulders of all those who had gone before them. Your technique will evolve from this point as you learn by trial and error or by interaction with your peers. It will also be affected by changes in technology in tools and materials.
Secondly, the technique that is best for you will depend on your level of skill. In the beginning you will need a technique that is safe but probably slow. As your level of skill rises, you will be able to do safely things that were previously too risky, so your technique can be adjusted accordingly.
Finally, and probably most importantly, the best technique in the world is utterly useless if you don’t use it. In other words, technique has to be acommpanied by discipline, and in my experience as a teacher, this is the bit that separates the best students from the rest. Once you evolve a successful technique, you need to use it all of the time.
Modern sportspeople pursue excellence with a passion that is probably unrivalled by any other people in the world. Where is the woodworker who gets up at 5.30am to cut ten dovetails before breakfast? Or the one who practises basic woodworking skills for two hours every afternoon? Sports coaches have long twigged to the importance of honing basic skills until they become automatic, so they will stand up under pressure. They spend hour after hour, using highly sophisticated equipment, analysing technique, seeking better ways or probing for weakness. Pity the poor cricket batsman who has a deficient defensive technique. By the time he gets to the crease his opponents will have set a field and planned a bowling attack carefully designed to exploit his weakness.
If you watch someone like Greg Norman play golf you will get a lesson in the importance of technique and discipline. He uses the best equipment to give himself the best chance of success. Then he plays every shot, no matter how easy it must be for a player of his calibre, as though it was the most difficult shot he has played all day. You will not see a single careless or casual move. You will see focus, concentration, and discipline. And a leve of skills that is the result of a certain amount of innate talent mixed with an enormous quantity of sheer hard work.
We too can develop exercises that we can do every day to hone our basic skills, just as musicians practise their scales. You might, for example, take a piece of 50 x 25mm wood, square a line around it about 5mm in from one end, then take your saw and cut it off, trying to split the line on all four faces. It is important when marking, that the end of the line meet exactly the beginning. These tasks need to be practised until they can be done routinely.
As you struggle with them, you will evolve your own technique for doing them. This might include some tried and true elements, such as always working with the square from one reference face and one reference edge. Other things you might work out for yourself, such as always rolling the woord away from you as you move to transfer the line from one face to the next. This ensures that you are always marking from a far face towards you, which is more comfortable, and hence more likely to be accurate, than working from the near face and away from you.
It is worth remembering that the technical side of woodwork is ruthlessly logical. The wood doesn’t care whether or not you are a good or bad person, or how much you deserve to succeed. There is no room for wishful thinking, for just hacking away in the hope that it will be alright at the end. Once you accept the reality of this logic, you can turn it to advantage. If a joint is marked out accurately, and cut accurately, then it must fit. Logically, this must be so. The reverse is also true: if it is not marked out accurately, or not cut accurately, it won’t fit. How much care do you take to make sure your marking out and cutting is as perfect as you can make it? And if it isn’t how do you expect to get the result you want?
If it doesn’t fit find out why. I hate to think how many times I have had to help puzzled students understand that the reason the joint won’t close up is because they have left a whopping great splinter of wood in the corner of one half of it, or that they do not have two flat surfaces coming together, but two rounded ones.
When you do start thinking about your work you are well on the way to developing a good technique. Inevitably you will develop a feedback loop. If you make a mistake once you might be content to dismiss it as carelessness. If you make it twice, especially if you do so in spite of your most attentive care, you will start to think about ways and means of changing your technique so as to make it impossible for that mistake to ever occur again. Over time you will tighten your technique until you can routinely produce excellent work.
It is important to realise, too, that this process needs to cover the entire range of factors that affect our woodwork. We need to pay attention to our workspace, our tools, and our raw materials because these are all important parts of comprehensive technique. Remember that good technique is all about maximising the chances of success, and minimising the risk of failure. It should be obvious that the quality of our workplace, tools and materials will contribute to this.
With simple common sense we can increase the quality of our work. Technique is a very real issue to think about. Over the past few years I have watched a lot of different people work, and I have been driven to wonder why it is so easy for some and so terribly difficult for others. Technique is not a complete answer to that question, but I am sure it is an important part of it.
*First published in Australian Wood Review, issue 11 page 84 (June 1996)
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