I have been teaching woodwork one way or another since about 1990, where I have not only had to worry about how to do the various things that I have been trying to teach my students, but have also had to try to find the best way to communicate my instructions to them. And then, when their attempts met with any degree of failure, I have had to understand why, and then communicate again to attempt to correct what they have done.
Over time, just about every possible mistake has been made (and a few you would not believe were possible). Most of these I have also made myself at some point in my career, as will most long time woodworkers. That old saying about the inevitability of death and taxes needs to be expanded to read the inevitability of death, taxes and mistakes.
Some errors, in fact, occur so frequently that I have come to expect them from most new students as part of the learning process, and I have spent a lot of time thinking about how to best deal with them. As the mistakes have accumulated I have tried to extract from them common elements that might usefully be united into a rule, or a technique, or an awareness that would help any student to either avoid the mistake entirely or, at least, to get past them as soon as possible.
Out of this constant interaction with a large number of different students over quite a long time, I have evolved my general rules for using hand tools. You will notice right away that they are general and not specific. They are directed at how you approach doing something, rather than at the specifics of what you might be doing. In this way they are able to be applied to a multitude of different situations and so are more useful than a specific rule for a specific occasion.
My Ten Commandments are:
1. Woodwork is brutally logical.
2. In the long run, the slow way is the fastest way.
2a. Creep up on the desired result. Don’t rush at it.
2b. A number of small cuts is better than a single big one.
2c. True speed means getting the desired result quickly. It does not mean hurrying.
3. True speed comes with time and practice.
4. True speed results when Technique and Discipline become normal work habits.
5. Practice basic skills.
6. Focus on the details. Tiny improvements might be small, but a lot of them add up to a large improvement overall.
7. Develop feedback: see, analyse, adjust.
8. Accept that making mistakes is a necessary part of learning.
8a. Expect to have to learn something many times in order to totally ‘get’ it.
9. Enjoy the process and forget about getting finished. Reframe your goal.
10. Give yourself a fair chance: use good tools, good materials, in a good workspace.
In Rules 2 and 8, I have included other ways of saying essentially the same things, but each alternative does introduce additional aspects of the rule that are important enough to deserve individual mention. In other words, I have observed these aspects over and over again in classes over the years, and have formulated the rule in slightly different ways as a result.
Let me explain what I am getting at with each rule in a little more detail.
1. WOODWORK IS BRUTALLY LOGICAL.
On the surface, of course, you might think this is very, very obvious. But that is before hope warps our logic. At some level we know that if we don’t mark out our joint correctly it won’t fit properly, but still, we hope that it will. Or perhaps we hope that we have, in fact, marked it out correctly even though the evidence before our eyes suggest otherwise.
So there is a battle in our heads between our logic and our psychology, and psychology usually wins. We want everything to work. We want our surfaces to be flat and our joints to be gap free, our dimensions to be perfect and our skills sublime. So too easily, we suspend our beliefs and give in to our hopes.
But it cannot work. “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed”. The Woodworking God of Logic doesn’t care about me. It doesn’t care how good I have been, how hard I have tried, how much I truly deserve to succeed. It only cares about one thing: do it right and it will work; don’t, and it won’t. It is as simple as that, and as brutal. There are no favours, no exceptions, no concessions. It reminds me of my computer actually, which is exasperatingly literal in its logic at times, so it might help to think of woodworking like that.
The aim of this rule is to get my students to accept the hard, cold reality of the logic of what they are doing. Wood might be a wonderfully emotive material, and doing woodwork might be a wonderfully creative outlet, but it is also brutally logical. If a joint is marked accurately, and cut accurately, it not only will fit, but must fit. Logically, there is nowhere else to go. But the converse also holds: if it is not marked accurately, or not cut accurately, it will not fit. Not unless I am very, very lucky, and all the errors just happen to cancel each other out.
Another way of saying this is to say that I must be honest with myself and not let wishful thinking warp my view of what is before my eyes.
But while logic might be brutal, it does have an upside. If we use our brains instead of our emotions, when something does go wrong, it will be for a reason (or reasons), and we can use logic to figure out why, and how to fix it.
2. IN THE LONG RUN, THE SLOW WAY IS THE FASTEST WAY.
What this rule says is that while it is slow to take my time over my work to make sure that I get it right, it is nevertheless faster than having to do it all again because I rushed it and ruined it.
This is probably the most painful of the rules, because we all seem fated to learn it the hard way by banging our heads against it repeatedly. There are many aspects of it (for example, Rules 2a, b, c, and Rule 9) that are important enough to list, but no doubt you will know of a lot more.
2a. CREEP UP ON THE DESIRED RESULT. DON’T RUSH AT IT.
What this aspect of Rule 2 suggests is that it is more efficient, and hence faster, to adopt a strategy right from the beginning of intending to achieve a specific result in a series of steps, and not in one do or die effort. Planning to take a number of steps means I only try to get part of the way in my first attempt. I then stop and use some method to establish how I am going. This allows me to correct what I am doing, if necessary, with my next attempt, which is also intended to only take me part of the way to my final goal. I can then repeat my test of my progress, and make my next attempt, and so on. This will also tell me when I am close to where I want to be, and warn me to be very careful with the last little bit.
Once again this might sound trivially obvious, but my experience teaching tells me that, in practice, it is not. Not often enough anyway. It might help achieve the correct mind-set if we were to think of ourselves as working in a bomb disposal squad, or as a brain surgeon. That would ensure that we were not too rash or hasty.
The problem with woodwork is that it is not always possible to put the wood back, so overshooting the mark and taking too much wood off usually has unfortunate consequences. If we pick up a plane or a chisel and just cut away until we reach our mark, we adopt an all or nothing approach. It will work sometimes when we either hit the mark or fall short of it. But inevitably we will also sometimes overshoot the mark, and that’s the problem.
I believe I am more likely to get the result I want by patiently creeping up on it. It allows me to focus my attention on small details and make small corrections, and as a result, carefully nudge my way, bit by bit, to where I want to go.
2b. A NUMBER OF SMALL CUTS ARE BETTER THAN ONE BIG ONE
Again, this is obviously compatible with Rules 2 and 2a, but it also has other aspects worth considering.
The thinner the chip or shaving I take with a chisel or plane, the smaller the force is that the cut requires. This allows me to work within my comfort zone where I have best control of the tool, which in turn means my work is more likely to be accurate.
This is also true with narrower chips or shavings. Thus I am better off using a narrow chisel or plane and making more cuts if it means working more comfortably and accurately.
When chopping directly down into wood, a frequently overlooked consequence of taking a thick cut with a chisel is that a component of the force resisting the cut acts to drive the chisel back into the shoulder of the wood behind it. Thus I might start the cut with my chisel on the line, but finish it with my chisel behind the line, because this force has been large enough to compress the wood in the shoulder. This is particularly likely to happen with thick cuts in softwoods, because of the combination of a low compressive strength for the wood, and a large force generated by the thick chip.
I believe that fine cuts made easily with sharp, well tuned tools work the best. I seldom chop or pare more than 1mm at a time with a chisel, and frequently take much less than that. A good cut with a plane gives me a shaving of about .002 or .003 inches (0.050 mm or 0.076 mm). I only do more than this for rough work or where it is very safe.
2c. TRUE SPEED MEANS GETTING THE DESIRED RESULT QUICKLY. IT DOES NOT MEAN HURRYING.
This is another way of expressing the old saying about hurried work being “all haste and no speed”. If I hurry I can give the impression that I am working quickly. I am a flurry of activity. But none of this means that I will necessarily finish the job quickly, because I might have to spend a lot of time fixing mistakes.
A more accurate measure of how fast I am working is how quickly I get the job done to the standard I require. Hurrying can easily cause more problems than it solves, so once again this rephrase Rule 2.
3. TRUE SPEED COMES WITH TIME AND PRACTICE.
If hurrying is not the way to achieve true speed, how does time and practice achieve it? I think it does it by increasing work efficiency. As the work becomes more familiar to me I do not need to spend time thinking about what comes next. As my skills increase I do what I need to do more accurately with less effort, and more quickly. A familiar analogy would be the process of learning to drive a car, where what at first seems to be an impossible number of things that need to be attended to simultaneously, come to be internalised and done easily and routinely.
When this happens my mind becomes free of ‘chatter’. There is no ‘remember to..’, or ‘watch out for..’, or ‘what do I do next..’. Instead, I am free to simply focus on the task at hand. Because my mind is free, I am left with what I can only describe as an amazing clarity, where what previously seemed complex has become extraordinarily simple and straightforward. It is when I am in this frame of mind that I can work quickly without any hurry at all.
4. TRUE SPEED RESULTS WHEN TECHNIQUE AND DISCIPLINE BECOME NORMAL WORK HABITS.
(a) TECHNIQUE is the result of dividing a task into as many steps as are necessary to get the task done reliably under real work conditions, and finding the best possible way to do each step.
(b) DISCIPLINE means using this technique all of the time, every time, for everything I do, with no exceptions.
I am very fortunate that these two rules come naturally to me, but I know that is not the case for everyone. It does require a particular personality, part analytical, part obsessional, part perfectionist, and I have enough of all those for it to work for me. But if that was not the case, I would have had to fight myself until I managed to reach a point where my technique, and the discipline to always use it, had become habits, because I firmly believe they are the cornerstones of fine work.
The best evidence of this that I know of is modern sport. I cannot think of anyone who practises harder than professional sportspeople (except perhaps classical musicians), or with more attention to the basic skills, techniques and discipline of their sport. No matter how good they are, they never seem to neglect these. This is particularly evidence in those sports that involve the skilful use of ‘tools’, such as tennis, cricket and golf.
Golf is a good example, as it is played slowly and the spectators are up close enough to get a good view. It provides a wonderful example of the benefits of a carefully honed technique where no detail is unimportant and neglected, and of a most exacting level of discipline. There are no shortcuts, no loose or sloppy shots. There is certainly no example of a good golfer using a random method each time they set up to hit the ball, or a casual approach to doing it. Golfers know that if they want to have the best chance of reliably hitting the ball where they want it to go, they must pay attention to their inherited ‘trade knowledge’, the tried and true techniques worked out over the years by the many golfers who have gone before them. They begin with this and adapt it to their own game as necessary. Once they have what they think is the best technique for them, they implement it rigorously every time they address the ball, with sufficient discipline to pay attention to every detail. They know that although this will not guarantee success, it will give them their best and most reliable chance of it.
I am constantly reminded of the importance of this whenever I teach a class. In particular, I am reminded of the critical importance of the final ‘extra bit’ that only the real perfectionist seems to care about. It means taking as much care with a small detail as with a large one. It means never making any cut, no matter how easy or trivial, without paying total attention to the proper technique for doing it. I think 90% of errors occur during the 10% of time when technique is neglected. That 10% is a failure of discipline.
With the best work, the margin of error is extremely small, and often one small mistake can make the difference between a good job and an unacceptable one. And, like the golfer bending over a million dollar putt, a woodworker making a critical cut, in a component of an irreplaceable piece of wood that has already had a considerable amount of work invested in it, needs a technique that he or she is confident will hold up under pressure.
5. PRACTISE BASIC SKILLS.
There are not a lot of basic skills in woodworking. I was surprised when I sat down to list them because it is a hugely complex craft. Much of it, however, is knowledge and experience, or perhaps specialist skills rather than basic ones. Turning and carving are specialist skills, for example, and both will have their own set of basic tool skills, so I guess I am really speaking here from the point of view of furniture making or cabinetmaking.
The basic hand skills I can think of are sharpening, marking out, planing, sawing, chiselling, and another I will loosely call polishing. I would add two more skills, however, that I know I have also had to work hard at developing over the years, and they are seeing, and judging.
It is not too difficult to work out exercises to give each of my hand skills a daily workout, should I have the dedication to do it. Nor is it too difficult to imagine the difference it would make to my work if I mastered each skill. Planing a small board flat and square, marking a square line around each end, sawing each end off so as to split the knife line, and remarking and paring the crooked end flat when I miss, would give all my skills except polishing a good workout. The marking, sawing and paring could continue until the board was used up.
Seeing and judging are more difficult to learn, but both skills are critically important for design. Seeing is also a large part of the basic hand skills, because if I can’t see what I’m doing, I don’t know what I am doing. I am not referring here to being able to physically see (critical though that is as well) but to being able to recognize the significance of what I see, or to be aware of what I see. I might look at a surface I have chiselled, for example, but if I don’t recognize the significance of the shadow the light throws just inside the edge, I cannot meaningfully say that I have seen it. I may well have noticed it, along with the colour of the wood and the figure in the surface and goodness knows what else, as part of the picture in front of me, but to really see it I need to isolate it, to focus on it as something of significance. That is what I mean by learning to see. I need to recognize that shadow as a hump in the surface, the shadow being like the shade on the eastern side of a hill in the late afternoon.
Judging is also part of learning basic skills because nothing is really black and white. No cut is ever exactly right, so I need to judge when it is close enough. A large part of learning to be a fine woodworker for me was learning to judge what an acceptable standard of work was, and deciding where I was going to set my own standards.
Seeing and judging become part of the broader design field when I begin to use them to decide on matters such as proportions, line, contrast, balance, and so on, all of which decide the look of what I am making. This is not an easy thing to learn, and for all I know might well depend on whether or not I chose my parents well. I am wary of rules, partly because there always seem to be exceptions to them, but mostly because, too easily, they become a crutch that stops me from exercising my own judgement, and without that exercise I will never learn to judge for myself.
While there does not seem to be any easy way to learn to see and judge in this broader design sense, I believe that the core issues is to never lose sight of what I like, no matter how fashionable or unfashionable it might be. I constantly practise by looking at all manner of things, particularly those that interest me, and by asking myself what it is, particularly, that causes me to like or dislike what I am looking at. I can then carry this knowledge and experience with me when I need to make a judgment in my work. It is by sticking to this core knowledge of what I like that I slowly develop my own distinctive design language and style.
Despite the avalanche of words written about art and design, I think that, from a maker’s point of view, it always comes down to asking that one simple question: Do I like it? Making judgments is hard work, especially without rules, but I know that if I want to design I cannot avoid wrestling with it.
6. FOCUS ON THE DETAILS. TINY IMPROVEMENTS MIGHT BE SMALL, BUT A LOT OF THEM ADD UP TO A LARGE IMPROVEMENT OVERALL.
An excellent piece of furniture can be looked at whole, but it is not created whole. It is the result of a large number of small acts, so it is not possible to make the whole better without doing at least some of the small acts better.
Trying to do large things is usually quite daunting, and is often overwhelming. But small things are much less so, and are usually quite achievable. And if the small thing happens many times during the job, the cumulative effect of the one small improvement repeated many times will be large. It is the same as it is with money – look after the cents and the dollars will take care of themselves.
So what this rule is focusing on is the attitude I bring to my work: do I get lost in the big picture. Or do I just concentrate on each small act as it occurs, happy in the knowledge that if I improve each one just a little bit, each time I do it, those small improvements will add up to get me to where I want to be. Eventually, the trick is to make the improvements permanent, and that is what these rules are all about.
7. DEVELOP FEEDBACK: SEE, ANALYSE, ADJUST.
Using a hand tool is an active, not a passive, process. Using a plane, for example, is not simply a matter of pushing it from one end of a board to the other. It isn’t even doing so while concentrating hard on using the correct technique, important though that is. It is more than that. My analytical brain must also be engaged during the pushing so that I can estimate how the work is going. As David Pye has famously put it, hand tools involve the Workmanship of Risk where we can fail at any time. It is always possible for the world’s best golfer to miss a 20cm putt.
So I need to be watching what I am doing and analysing the available evidence to understand what it is telling me. With a plane, this means watching the shaving in particular, because this tells me much about the surface I am creating. For example, if I am planing a joint, I know that I cannot possibly have planed a flat surface unless I have, at the very least, taken a full length, full width shaving. On its own this will not ensure that the surface is flat (or square) but at least I would know that my surface does not contain any facets, so I would know I was part of the way there.
I can read a similar story from the stone marks on a chisel when I am sharpening.
This type of analytical thinking will also tell me that if I need to use brute force to close up a joint, something is wrong. By looking and thinking about what I see I can find out what that is, and take the necessary corrective action.
This is the feedback loop: a continuous process of looking, seeing, analysing what I see, and adjusting what I am doing as a result of what I have seen. It is an active process. To do it well I need to learn a lot about why I do what I do, what is supposed to happen when I do it, how I might know when it is happening, and what I need to do to correct myself if it is not happening.
Some fortunate people find this quite automatic, but most don’t. It is closely related to Rule 5 (Seeing and Judging) and equally difficult to learn. One interesting way to help learn it is to try teaching some woodworking skill to someone else. That sharpens the analytical mind very quickly.
Most of all, however, there is no substitute for thinking.
8. ACCEPT THAT MAKING MISTAKES IS A NECESSARY PART OF LEARNING.
One of the most crippling, and unintended, by-products of may education was that it made me afraid and ashamed of making mistakes. They were proof of my incompetence, or stupidity. This was especially bad for me because I am a bit of a perfectionist and I can easily beat myself up and lose heart of a ‘silly’ mistake.
Properly speaking, however, I think a mistake only happens when I fail to do something that I have already done many times before. In other words, if I try something for the first time and muck it up, that doesn’t really qualify as a mistake. If I try something new in the experimental sense, and it fails, that also does not qualify as a mistake. In fact, it might be generally true that nothing done in the process of learning something qualifies as a mistake. What we call mistakes are a normal, natural, inevitable part of learning.
But if I know how to do something and have done it many times before, and, for example, through a lapse of discipline disregard my technique and muck up a chisel cut, then I think that can be called a mistake. Or if I measure incorrectly, that would qualify, as would misreading a plan.
But even then, annoying though they might be, mistakes such as these are also inevitable. Nobody is perfect. And once a mistake has been made, no amount of anger and self-flagellation is going to fix it. The best we can do is to try to learn from it.
8a. EXPECT TO HAVE TO LEARN SOMETHING MANY TIMES IN ORDER TO TOTALLY ‘GET’ IT.
I think it is natural and normal to need to practise doing something many times in order to be able to do it properly. I also need to hear many times what I am supposed to do, and how I am supposed to do it. I may need to be shown many times as well.
This is because, apart from the fact that I have an appalling memory, it is simply a fact that I can only focus on a limited number of things at any times, and anything more than that goes into a black hole. Each subsequent time through, however, there are some things I remember well enough to not need to focus on them again, so this allows me space to take in some new things. In this way I slowly work my way to that magical point where I know enough to know that I have really ‘got’ it.
The point here is that if we realize this is quite normal it helps us to cope with it, and frees us from feeling stupid or incompetent.
9. ENJOY THE PROCESS AND FORGET ABOUT GETTING FINISHED. REFRAME YOUR GOAL.
This rule is aimed mainly at those who do woodwork as a hobby rather than for a living. For most professional woodworkers, with bills to pay and families to feed, this rule would be a self-indulgent luxury.
Because I am a bit of a perfectionist, I could happily puddleduck about with projects forever and never get anything finished. But put me in a car and point me towards a distant city and I become absolutely single minded in my focus, and impatient of anything that gets in my way.
This does give me some understanding of what it is like to need to finish a project, to ‘get somewhere’. I think it is a psychological need rather than a real or practical one. It isn’t a safe need, because one of the most common contributors to workshop accidents is haste.
The problem with this need to get finished is that it is the enemy of both quality and satisfaction, both of which are usually a big part of why most of us do woodwork in the first place. In a sense, the need hijacks our brains, and we sacrifice everything to it. We become too impatient to do the work properly, and our satisfaction with the finished job suffers accordingly. Once the rush to finish has taken hold, we are very easily derailed. Any unexpected obstacle means an exasperating delay, and we don’t have the patience to deal with it in a properly workmanlike way. Bit by bit our satisfaction with the job leaks away.
It seems to me that the answer to this problem is introspection, and probably a lot of time spent thinking about the pointlessness of the cycle. Then some reframing of our goals is in order, with an emphasis on doing good work all the way and enjoying it. A qualitative goal, rather than a quantitative one.
10. GIVE YOURSELF A FAIR CHANCE: USE GOOD TOOLS AND GOOD MATERIAL IN A GOOD WORKSPACE.
If I use second rate tools and poor materials I am setting myself up to fail. It is true, of course, that fancy tools will not make me a good woodworker, but good tools will certainly make it much easier for me to become one, as will a good workspace. Doing fine work is hard enough without having unnecessary difficulties added to it. Giving myself good tools and a good workspace is simply acknowledging this, and giving myself every reasonable chance of success with my work.
By having good hand skills I save myself the need for a lot of gadgets, and I can invest the savings in better quality tools. If I can’t, or won’t, buy this quality, my only option is to learn how to acquire and tune second hand tools so that they will work as well as I need them to. It really boils down to spending money or spending time. It is also worth heeding the message I once saw on one old woodworker’s stall at a market: ‘Sure, you can make it yourself. But will you?’ In the end, spending the money is the easiest and surest way.
Having a comfortable, attractive workspace can be vitally important because, if doing the work is optional, we have to want to go and do it. If the workspace does not encourage this, if it is not a place that we love to be in, that we find ourselves (and our mates) going to simply because we like being there, then getting ourselves to the bench and beginning work becomes a battle that is too easily and too often lost. When we have to force ourselves to not go there, we will get some work done.
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