Fruition

Many years ago when Knew Concepts saws burst onto the marketplace I met and was befriended by the gurus behind them, Lee Marshall and Brian Meek.  There are not many tools that can change the way I work, but their saws did.  As an outgrowth of our friendship I began to collaborate with them to refine their products and even begin down the road of developing whole new tools.

One of the tools I encouraged them create was a vertical oriented marquetry chevalet.  Yes, I know that traditionalist and purists might snort at me for that position, but let me explain to you how much I care about that.  (Cue the sound of crickets.)  You can find my tale of encountering their initial engineering design prototype here.

Now for a little more background.

I have been cutting veneers for more than forty years, almost always in the context of repairing or replacing missing marquetry or plain veneers.  I learned to cut it on a horizontal bench pin using a jeweler’s frame saw freehand in the vertical orientation.

Once I got to use a traditional chevalet, a hand powered machine that interestingly enough post-dates what many think was the Golden Age of Marquetry, my experience and muscle memory/work habits left me unimpressed with my own skill with the tool.  I have seen others use it in a manner that could only be described as magnificent, but I have never developed a facility with the device to make it my default tool.  (It might very well be the result of me not having thousands of hours behind the wheel, so to speak, with an intimidating task master peering over my shoulder.  By the time I got to use a full-scale chevalet I was long passed the point of being intimidated about much of anything.  Once you go nose-to-nose with a bind drunk idiot neighbor shooting a revolver in his back yard while my kids were playing in my back yard, everything else takes its proper place in the hierarchy of intimidation.)  Instead, I always reverted to my older method in which I had honed my skills.

Once I saw Steve Latta demonstrate his version of a bench-top horizontal action chevalet I built my own, and I got better results with that than with the full scale, sit down version.  Not yet great, but better.  Still, I could see some great possibilities based on my execution of the concept.

Back to Knew Concepts.  I was attracted not only to their jeweler’s saw frames but practically swooned once I learned of their Mark Series of fixed-orientation saws.  I had to have one!  I got one and again it changed the way I could work in the marquetry techniques I used, mostly Boullework style and double-bevel style.  The Mark Series saw made cutting small pieces of marquetry (about a 6″ size limit) practically idiot-proof, and sometime I can be a pretty high-powered idiot.

Lee and Brian and I continued to correspond and meet at various woodworking tool events, and eventually I convinced them to give it a try.  Our dinners together always seemed to result in a stack of napkins covered in design drawings and spec lists. Brian came to see me in DC, well actually he came to see my bench top chevalet — I was incidental to the trip (not really, I always thoroughly enjoyed my interactions with Lee ad Brian, both creatively and socially) — and he returned to Crazyfornia to begin designing a saw incorporating and fusing all our ideas.  Soon computer generated design drawings were flying back and forth across the continent.

Then came the Woodworking in America 2016 when Lee promised to “show you something special.”  I could practically see the twinkle in his eye just from the email.  As I phrased it at the time,

“I encountered the working concept prototype whose gestation was several years, and as I worked with the tool I felt, more than heard, a thunderclap.  Everything that had been was now no more.”

Shortly thereafter Lee fell gravely ill, and eventually passed away.  Brian took the helm of the enterprise and the process of transition took all of his time and energy, and then some.  We corresponded infrequently for a couple years, then a few months ago it picked up again and I asked him if the bench top vertical-cut chevalet was ever going to become a production reality.  Knowing how swamped he was I sorta expected a note of the “Man I am just too busy to think about it,” variety.  Imagine my delight when instead he wrote back and told me they were in the home stretch of the initial production prototype.

Last week a couple packages arrived arrived, and it is better than Christmas at the Barn on White Run these days.  A whole lotta time, energy, and ideas have come to fruition.

Stay tuned.