Technology is unavoidable in today’s workshop. Be it a smart
phone in your pocket that rings just when you’re stretching to apply that last
clamp in the most awkward of positions, or an e-reader filled with the last two
decades of woodworking magazines and sawdust, only the most stubborn among us
has successfully banned all technology from their workspace. Even Roy
Underhill, who will not allow something as modern as a steel measuring tape in
his shop, tolerates the digital filming equipment that beams his show into our
television screens.
A woodworking shop is by definition a place where a bit of
the past is kept alive and the future is held at bay. In a world where more and
more furniture is made from manufactured wood products that a tree would never
recognize as its kin, by machines that suck a board in one end and spit a chair
out the other, the small garage shop is a throwback to vanishing way of life.
When we make something by hand, one piece at a time, with a material that is
widely considered an old fashioned luxury, we are reversing some of the
progress of our modern and enlightened society. So, why would a woodworker
allow his shop to be invaded by the very essence of this society, the computers
and cellphones and the tablets that are the tools of the society that seeks to
destroy what the small shop stands for? Why would a man who retreats to the garage
to unwind, after a forty hour work week in an office, flip on a satellite fed,
high definition LCD television screen over the bench? Why would a person who
cuts his dovetails by hand design that project on a sixty-four bit, four
gigahertz hyper threading computer with three dimensional modeling software?
Today’s woodworker is a sawing, sanding contradiction. We
take pride in our traditional craft, but if you offer us a faster way to
dovetail a drawer we’ll give you four hundred bucks for the jig. We rail
against cheap, mass produced furniture, but if we could justify the expense of
a CNC machine you can bet we’d make every project with a digitally controlled
router bit and just assemble the parts like a puzzle.
Of course, not every woodworker embraces all of the latest
technology. Some still insist on the quiet, dust free bliss of traditional hand
tools. Not the wood-bodied planes used for centuries, mind you. No, the best
“traditional” hand tools are precisely machined to tolerances measured beyond
the thousandth. They upgrade to the new tool steels created in labs and
cryogenically hardened. They sharpen that steel with state of the art honing
films and diamond pastes that are far finer than the messy old oil stones.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m one of you. I love the idea of
traditional woodworking. I imagine myself sitting on a shaving horse with a
drawknife and hickory shavings up to my waist. But I also love the idea of a
micro-adjustable, multi-functional, lead-screw driven box joint jig.
I suppose it all comes down to the meaning of two words:
“technology” and “traditional”. I imagine that the first caveman woodworker
simply banged a stick with another stick. To him, any edged tool was
“technology” and those who used them were betraying the “traditional” craft.
I’ll bet the great masters of the eighteenth century had an entirely different
idea of traditional woodworking than we have today. To a guy with an iron
combination plane, a set of wooden skew rabbet planes must have seemed old
fashioned indeed. When Stickley began mass producing his craftsman furniture in
a big shop full of steam powered workstations Roubo surely rolled over in his
Paris grave. But who today would look at a piece of Stickley furniture and call
it a betrayal of the craft?
The point I am making is a simple one. If you want to be a
true purist you’ll have to reject far more than workshop computers or power
tools or even iron hand planes. You’ll have to go back to rocks and sticks.
Otherwise you will just be the newfangled woodworker with all the fancy tools
to the first cave man you meet. Today’s latest technologies are sure to become
tomorrow’s traditional tools just as yesterday’s innovations are today’s
antiques. My solution is to embrace the true tradition of the craft, and it has
nothing to do with the tools or the way you use them. It has little to do with
your selection of materials or choice of joinery. It’s what drove the first
woodworker to pick up the first stick and say “ugh… me turn this into chair for
Thag…” It’s the desire to create something from scratch, to take raw materials
and turn them into something you can point to and say “I made that”. It’s art
even if you’re not artistic, you’re creating even if you’re not creative. THAT
is the true woodworking tradition, and it won’t matter if woodworkers of the
future cut flawless joints with lithium crystals controlled by a series of eye
blinks from an easy chair. Because some day, even that will be considered old
school woodworking.
