Musings

Luxuriating in Peculiarity

I’m in the final week of a project that in some respects highlights my idiosyncratic nature, and truth be told I sorta revel in not fitting in.  (I’ll be blogging at length about this project starting in a week or so, and it will take several dozen postings to get it all.)

My first sense of not fitting in with woodworking came on November 9, 1980, when I attended a weekend workshop in Atlanta taught by Ian Kirby.   I remember it so precisely because it was in a classroom at Georgia Tech, and that was the day that Tech tied the #1  football team (Notre Dame) in the country and the campus went wild.  The subject of the workshop was ostensibly mortise-and-tenon joinery, but I seem to recall him spending an inordinate amount of time extolling the virtues of a new power tool, the biscuit joiner.  Of course I bought one, and of course it has remained unused for the past 46.99 of the intervening 47 years.  I’m soon sending it off to my friend Pete who can put it to good use.

As is often the case at weekend workshops, regardless of the setting or instructor, there is the opening ritual of the attendees introducing themselves to each other.  At this particular weekend the attendees were a mixture of doctors, lawyers, accountants and such.  When I introduced myself as a finisher by trade and that I loved finishing, I could almost sense the rest of the students recoiling as though I was some alien creature whose spaceship was parked out on the lawn.  Despite that, and despite the fact that I was the youngest participant by two or three decades, at every break and every meal I was peppered with questions about the mysterious and un-knowable world of finishing.

I’ve heard that surveys of the populace reveal that the single greatest fear is the terror induced by the prospect of public speaking (I have no such trepidation, probably because I do not care if the audience agrees with me or not).  During that student introduction I was left with a distinct impression that has become cemented over the decades that some/many/most/virtually all woodworkers are as terrified of finishing as they are of public speaking.

Which brings me to my current project, as this week I am rubbing out and detailing the finish I have been so lovingly applying for the past 40 or so hours of shop time.  Not only has every moment of the surface prep and application been something to savor, the bringing of the piece to exquisiteness through the finishing process is simply an embarrassment of riches to me.  Sure, I found it amusing to make the piece from scratch using almost exclusively early-19th Century technologies as specified by the client, including resawing the lumber, cutting all the lumber and joinery by hand, carving all the moldings, hand sawing and assembling the veneerwork.  But to me they were simply the appetizer.

Finishing is the feast, and the whole point of the making.  Which I guess makes me a polisher luxuriating in my own peculiarity.