Sam Maloof and his signature rocker.

Most woodworkers fall into the “OK” or “good” category; but what makes a great woodworker? What is a “great” woodworker, anyway?

I’d like to try to answer that, and further, what makes a great woodworker great?

In my mind, a great woodworker stands out; his work is distinguishable from others, because it is technically perfect, useful and creative.

It’s technically perfect, in that joints are done right, a correct wood is used, as are adhesives and fasteners. The finish is flawless. In general, there are no flaws to be found – or if there are, you really had to look for them – e.g,, wood putty.

It’s useful, in that it suits it’s purpose extremely well. When we say that an object is “good” we mean to say that it carries out it’s purpose extremely well, if not perfectly. A chair, for example – it’s comfortable, sturdy, and attractive; it’s a good chair. Artful woodwork, such as carvings, can also be termed “good” – a good piece of art evokes an emotion; that maybe a wow factor, a feeling of beauty, and so on. Good art does that.

Creative – without creativty, woodworkers just become Xerox copiers, in effect. Yes, that’s a great copy of an 18th century grandfather clock – but, it’s still just a copy. It’s like these “tribute” musical acts – guys that sound just like Frank Sinatra, the Beatles or Elvis – ok, they do sound and look like the original – but they will never be as good as the original, nor as popular. Likewise, great woodworkers are creative; they take a fresh approach on an old theme – Maloof did it with a rocker, Krenov with a cabinet, Eames with a chair. All these great woodworkers took the common and made it…better.

So now we have some qualities of what may be considered a “great” woodworker; but what makes them that way?

I’ll take a crack at this.

I think the greatest attributes are creativity and passion.

Passion means you are very interested in the subject, you have a love for it. It may be on your mind often, almost like a love interest. You might consider it your life’s work, your drive, your reason for living even.

Creativity is the quality of being able to formulate something new with existing materials; that may be taking a set of oils and making a classic painting; it may be taking food ingredients and creating a delicious dish, or it maybe taking wood and making something useful and beautiful. You have the ability to visualize something new and interesting in your mind.

However, you also need to be able to carry out the ideas that come from passion and creativity. You need technical skill. I may be able to think of a wonderful guitar song in my mind, but I can’t play guitar, and me trying to make it happen on a guitar would be horrendous – I have no technical skill for the guitar. Likewise, a great woodworker has a great deal of technical skill at his/her disposal; they can make happen in the real world what they have seen in their mind’s eye – and do that exceedingly well. This includes everything from selecting beautiful and appropriate wood to that last brush swipe on the finish.

Another “skill” or at least need that a great woodworker must have (or has someone that can do it for them) is a marketing campaign of sorts – awareness. What good would it be to have a Maloof rocker in a storage closet, or a Mona Lisa behind another painting? Mustn’t others be aware of it to be great? I’m not sure the answer is yes here, honestly. I can build a great desk, beautiful and functional, perhaps even on par with a Maloof rocker or Krenov cabinet – yet if no one else saw it, would it still be great? Well, yes it would, because how great a desk it is isn’t dependent on other’s awareness of it. However, if I want to be considered a great woodworker, others would need to be aware of my work. “Great” people of any kind need to be in the mind of the public to be known as such.

So there you have my idea of what a great woodworker is; what say you?

$1.99 For iPhone & iPad

INCHcalc is a refreshingly simple, easy-to-use fraction calculator.

In going thru several fractional calculator apps, I’ve found the hardest part to be entering the fraction. INCHcalc makes it easy. In the example at left, you would hit 45 FT, 8 IN, 3 / 8. Once you do it, you don’t forget it. Other calculators I’ve tried are just not that intuitive.

INCHcalc is simple to use. No clogging the screen with Pitch, Rise, Acre, etc – all stuff the average woodworker doesn’t use (though carpenters would).

Buttons are big, and easy to use. The screen is very easy to see – though I might have been interested in a smaller fractional size display, with numerator over denominator, rather than side by side, but no big deal.

There is nothing really lacking with INCHcalc; in fact, it’s simplicity is what makes it great. HOWEVER, if there where additional things that could be added, here is what I would like:

• A button that would take the result in the window, and convert it to either metric or decimal.

• The author’s website doesn’t show it, but it would be nice if the program had a metric equivalent - METRICCcalc, if you will. America, Liberia, Burma, and parts of the UK are the only countries still widely using  the English system. I wish we were using the Metric system, then I probably wouldn’t need a calculator – which, thinking about it now, is probably why there is no metric version! Everything is based in units of ten, not 12s!

If you are a carpenter as well, and need functions such as Pitch, Rise, Volumes, Areas, and so on, there is INCHcalc Pro, at $4.99, which gives you INCHcalc as well, INCHcalc Pro kicking in when you turn the phone to landscape.

To sum up, INCHcalc, is an app that I use all the time in the shop – it’s simplicity and ease of entering fractions make it a winner in my book.

Get it:  Website    iTunes

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FineWoodworking Magazine - The premier woodworking magazine. A wide variety of articles, and for everyone from beginners to masters. I’m a member of their online community as well, and I love that I can download PDFs of articles from the magazine, and can keep them conveniently on my hard drive.

Lumberjocks - a place for the average to advanced woodworker to show off his projects; a robust forum; classes. Lots of traffic, well laid out.

Twitter - You can find lots of varieties of woodworking disciplines on Twitter. I follow WoodworkingNetwork (@WoodworkingBiz), Popular Woodworking ‏(@pweditors), and WoodworkersInstitute ‏(@woodworkers), to name a few. Problem with some woodworkers when they tweet? They put up useless stuff – like “I just got done with my cabinet!”. Nobody cares! By the way, you can follow me at @NewMissionWkshp. I promise to tweet only relevant stuff!

Facebook Woodworking Groups page - A pretty active and interesting group on FB.

CustomMade - The best place to sell your stuff, if you are a pro woodworker than can run with a client’s request. They bring makers (like you and I) together with folks out there looking to have stuff made (“Round dining table with leaf. Approximately 40″ to 48″ with a leaf. No inlay necessary.”) I do about 90% of my work through them. No fee, except when you sell – they get a reasonable 10%.

$975

An elliptical top, arched legs, and decorative piercings add grace and beauty to this Craftsman-style table modeled after a library table by Charles Limbert. This scaled-down version preserves the original overall proportions, as well as elliptical top and shelf, gently curved legs, and decorative piercings in the stretchers. Bridle joints hold the legs and aprons together, and a notched bridle joint is used where the stretchers intersect. The legs and shelf are notched where they meet, and slip tenons join the stretchers to the legs.

Dimensions: Oval top is approx 3′ x 2′, table top is 20″ in height.

Material: all solid quarter-sawn white oak.

Design: G Paolini

There’s a lot of competition out there; you’ve always got to have a leg up on the competion. Well, I think I may have found the greatest “leg up” of them all.

My current big hammer is SketchUp and it’s rendering engine Kerykethea. Together, I’ve mastered them enough to be able to create a photo-realistic rendering of a piece. It’s a great tool for presenting a potential client with a project idea. You “build it” in the virtual world – without actually building it. Change woods, add things, delete them – all without creating dust. That’s a great selling tool for me, because I don’t believe a lot of woodworkers do that.

Well, being on the lookout for an even better tool to wow clients with, it struck me, once I saw an ad for this product – a 3D printer, in this case by Cubify.

Was IS a 3D printer? Well, it “prints” out plastic replicas of whatever you design in their software, with exacting detail, in color, and with the ability to print very complex shapes, even moving parts. It’s crazy what these things can do.

So how to use this to wow a client? Well, how about instead of just sending them photo realistic renderings of a piece – actually sending them the piece?! Just in miniature. Something a customer could actually hold in their hand and evaluate. I think you could say you are the only woodworker – anywhere – doing that.

If that won’t wow a client, I don’t know what will! Back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, salesman would actually take miniature samples of the their wooden products to potential clients – including miniature pianos. Obviously, taking furniture place to place back then was not easy; miniatures were.

And not only would it be a great sales tool, but a great shop tool as well. Since this model can print up to about 10″ square, imagine all of the things you could print out – parts for jigs, for example, or I’m sure, many other things that have to be custom. It’s essentially micro-manufacturing.

This model runs about $2500 – about as much as a cheaper CNC machine. Now granted, CNC machines make real items with real wood – the 3D printer is plastic (or metal like polymers in higher end machines), so you can’t print out a chest-on-chest – yet. But what a unique, useful tool – not just for the shop, but selling as well.

Bailey, my Beagle.

All vocations have a pecking order, every company has a hierarchy. There is the newbie, there is the master; there is the new sales associate, and the CEO. The world of selling woodworking is no different; there are little dogs, medium dogs and big dogs, to employ some canine metaphors. There are also advantages and disadvantages to each, just as each dog breed has theirs. I have a beagle, and unfortunately, not really sure what her advantages are!

The guy that sells small items at craft shows. This guy makes a bunch of cutting boards, children’s toys or planters, for example, and takes them to local and/or regional craft shows, setting up a booth, typically 12×12, and spending a whole weekend or more watching people, and trying to sell to them. This is typically a guy that doesn’t make a living off this venture, but may be retired, or is seeking supplemental income. He might enjoy going to different venues and chatting with potential customers and other artisans. He’d like to make a few extra bucks, but it’s not necessarily his primary motivation.

Disadvantages:

• You have to haul your product to a location, set up a booth in a decent location, display your wares, hope for good weather, pray you are in the right venue for your wares, and make enough to at least cover your expenses and then some.
• Typically, only lower price items do well, in the up to $30 range.
• Your customers are overwhelmingly women, and not both sexes.
• You might be assigned a bad booth location.

Advantages:

• If you’re just doing it for fun, some extra money, there’s no big pressure on you to make sales.
• You get to meet people, see what other artists are up to, make friends, learn how to market better.
• Can be very personally gratifying if you do a good amount of sales.
• You may not have a lot of money invested.

How to move up:

• Move to selling online, with a unique item. Use venues like Etsy, which is essentially a very nice craft show marketing largely to women. Your time might be better spent creating a unique piece at around the same price point your’e at now, but you’ll be able to market to tens of thousands more people, and not be sitting out in the hot sun at a bad show, trying to keep your canopy from flying away.

The guy that sells online, moderately priced goods. This fellow will typically be selling craft show type items, all the way up to larger pieces, like casework. He’s more serious about making money on woodworking. He believes he has a product people will want, and is trying to reach out to them. He probably has a website, and sells on Etsy, eBay, or other such fee for sale venues. He probably doesn’t do all that well, and is frustrated.

Disadvantages:

• He doesn’t have enough marketing savvy, not does he spend enough time doing so.
• Doen’t quite have the top level skills or product needed to distinguish himself from others.
• Is discouraged from lack of sales.
• Price is an issue for customers.

Advantages:

• Has a larger potential audience because of his lower priced goods.
• Isn’t locked into a certain genre or product line, because of his reputation.

How to move up:

• Develop your skills. If you’re going to move up to the top dog level, you’ll be going against the best of the best. You don’t deserve to be there unless you’ve earned it. If you stink at finishing (i still have a lot of room for improvement), take classes until you’ve mastered it.
• Make and build you’re own designs. Yes, maybe you can make one hell of a nice chest on chest, Windsor chair, or mission style clock – but so can’t a heck of a lot of other guys – and besides, it’ll be the millionth chest on chest, Windsor chair or mission style clock – a yawner. Nobody remembers the second person to walk on the moon. You have to be original AND good. You might have the voice of Sinatra, but the song writing skills of Justin Bieber, to use a metaphor.
• Marketing, baby. People can’t buy it if they don’t know about it. You’ve got a website – ok, but is a great one? Really? If it’s going to be your storefront, it’s worth spending some time and money on. I know you probably don’t want to get into web design, so either pay someone to do it, or get onto WordPress (which this site is using) and buy a nice template that says “classy” and has earth tones, and isn’t too flashy. WordPress is easy to use. Keep track of customers – their names, emails, what they bought – if they like your stuff, they are likely to buy from you again. Occasionally mail out a sale you have going on, send a little brochure, anything. You’ve got a customer, keep them.
• Up your prices. I know this goes against your woodworking DNA, but you’ve got to think bigger. You’re afraid to price too high, because people will balk at the price, and go elsewhere. Let them. They aren’t the customers you’re going to want anyway, if you’re going to move up. People might actually buy more, because they believe that your (clock, chair, chest) must be good, because it costs so much.
• Learn how to photograph. Why bother building great stuff, if you can’t photograph it nicely? I’m going to do a piece shortly on photography on the cheap – you won’t believe the results you can get.

The guy that sells to rich clients, and receives commissions. This woodworker has climbed to the top of the heap – he’s proven he’s very talented, and can command exorbitant prices for his work, and has clients coming after him for custom work; so much so, that he might be backed up months, if not a year or more. He has a reputation in the woodworking community, and may even teach classes, writes books, teach workshops, or be asked to write for a woodworking magazine.

Disadvantages:

• May be too old to feel up to making big pieces
• After reaching the pinnacle, finds no more challenge in it, and moves on to another art.

Advantages:

• Can pick and choose what he wants to do; he can accept or decline commissions.
• He commands top dollar for his work.
• Customers don’t typically care about price.
• He can spend less time on marketing, and more time producing.
• Enjoys the notoriety.

Further reading from my blog posts:

• Tips on How to Sell Your Woodworking, Part One
• Tips on How to Sell Your Woodworking, Part Two
• Etsy and You, The Woodworker
• The $7,000 Lamp
• How to Make it Big in Woodworking

Roycroft “Magazine Pedestal”

The Arts and Crafts movement wasn’t all just about Stickley or Limbert; the Roycrofters also had a say in the matter; but who exactly were the Roycrofters?

To answer that question, we need to know a bit about the Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th century. “Movements” generally refer to a group of people working together to advance their shared political, social, or artistic ideas. This was the case with the Arts and Crafts movement.

The industrial revolution was over; many things were made by machine, especially furniture, though the furniture is still the same old style, just made faster – and more shoddily. Craftsmanship was pretty much gone out the window; people were sick of the industrial lifestyle – hard work in terrible conditions,  economic and social conditions that are unsatisfactory; they felt separated from nature. People tired of it, and revolted, taking on a new lifestyle, standing for traditional craftsmanship using simple forms and often applied medieval, romantic or folk styles of decoration. It advocated economic and social reform and has been said to be essentially anti-industrial.

The lived together sometimes, almost commune-like. They were basically the late 19th century’s hippies.

From Wikipedia….

The name “Roycroft” was chosen after the printers, Samuel and Thomas Roycroft, who made books in London from about 1650–1690. And beyond this, the word roycroft had a special significance to Elbert Hubbard, meaning King’s Craft. In guilds of early modern Europe, king’s craftsmen were guild members who had achieved a high degree of skill and therefore made things for the King. The Roycroft insignia was borrowed from the monk Cassidorius, a 13th century bookbinder and illuminator.

Elbert Hubbard had been influenced by the ideas of William Morris on a visit to England. He was unable to find a publisher for his book Little Journeys, so inspired by Morris’s Kelmscott Press, decided to set up his own private press to print the book himself, founding Roycroft Press.

His championing of the Arts and Crafts approach attracted a number of visiting craftspeople to East Aurora, and they formed a community of printers, furniture makers, metalsmiths, leathersmiths, and bookbinders. A quotation from John Ruskin formed the Roycroft “creed”:

A belief in working with the head, hand and heart and mixing enough play with the work so that every task is pleasurable and makes for health and happiness.

Elbert Hubbard, Roycrofters founder.

The inspirational leadership of Hubbard attracted a group of almost 500 people by 1910, and millions more knew of him through his essay A Message to Garcia.

In 1915 Hubbard and his wife, noted suffragette Alice Moore Hubbard, died in the sinking of RMS Lusitania, and the Roycroft community went into a gradual decline. Following Elbert’s death, his son Bert took over the business. In attempts to keep his father’s business afloat, Bert proposed selling Roycroft’s furniture through major retailers. Sears & Roebuck eventually agreed to carry the furniture, but this was only a short lived success.

Fourteen original Roycroft buildings are located in the area of South Grove and Main Street in East Aurora. Known as the “Roycroft Campus”, this rare survival of anart colony was awarded National Historic Landmark status in 1986.

The Elbert Hubbard Roycroft Museum, housed in the George and Gladys Scheidemantel House, in East Aurora is the main collection and research centre for the work of the Roycrofters.

So, there we have a bit of history of the Roycrofters…

WoodMaster  

$7.99 For iPhone & iPad

Woodmaster is quite expensive (for an app) at $7.99. I’m willing to pay that – if that app is good. Unfortunately, WoodMaster falls short, but had a lot of promise.

The good news: good interface, great graphics, and a good assortment of applications.

The bad news: interface falls flat in some places, and applications I don’t think most would want.

In calculating fractions (as in, 1 5/8″ + 17 19/16″), the author thought an impossible to see slide ruler would be a good idea, with Fraction Calculator (Sliderule version). The tick marks are illegible, and who uses a slide rule anymore? What’s the benefit of going analog on a digital device? There is none. The Fraction Calc (Numeric) is much better, and does the job.

The Board Foot Calc is fine, and lets you not just calculate BF, but add to a tally. Good.

The Fraction to Dec & mm convertor would be much more useful if we could include inches! As it is, you can just convert fractions of an inch to a decimal and mm equivalent. Great, 21/32″ is 16.7 mms, but how many mms is 5 3/4″? Put an inch wheel in there as well.

Length Conversions, from English to Metric, and vice versa, is fine.

Proportionnal Calculator  could have been much better. This tool is supposed to be for those times when you are scaling – such as making a table 3/4 scale of the original. If the original length of a piece was 32 3/16″ long by 6″ wide by 1″ thick, what would the size at 3/4s? This won’t tell you. You can’t enter fractions, and the interface is confusing. From what I could figure out (even after reading directions), you enter the original width and height, as well as the new width or new height; the calculator will figure out the new width or height – whatever was missing. Not really helpful.

The Golden Ratio calculator could also be better. Again, you can’t enter a fraction, and maybe you don’t really need to, as this is a matter of design, not exact measurement This calculator simply gives you a ratio on a board. For example, if I enter 5 as the dimension, the Golden Ratio is 3.09 and 1.91. As a woodworker, what the heck is 3.09 and 1.91 in terms of inches?! How is that useful to me? It’s fine if you want this calculator in here, i can see a possible use for it, but jeez, make the resulting calculation usable!

A useful calculator for a carpenter app would be the Nominal to Actual Size calculator. This converts stated sizes to real sizes. In other words, a 2×4 is not actually 2″ x 4″, it’s actually 1 1/2″ x 3 1/2″. Not sure when I would use that as a woodworker, as I rarely use construction grade lumber.

Screw sizes is a reference chart. For instance, if you are using a #3 screw, the head bore is 13/64″, the shank hole is 7/64, and the pilot hole should be 1/16″ For me, that’s handy, because I’m forever using calipers to measure a screw’s shank (as opposed to the thread width) to determine the size of pilot hole I should be drilling.

Nail Sizes is just a reference chart – “How big are 2d nails? – 1 inch. That’s fine to have.

Joint Types enlists beautiful graphics to illustrate different fairly common joints. It’s a slide side-to-side type presentation; perhaps a listing view would be better? Instead of just the name of a joint, maybe include benefits  and disadvantages of that type of joint?

Wood Types is simply a graphical listing of various woods, ostensibly for identification purposes.

Knock Down Sawhorse  and Knock down Workbench  are nicely illustrated graphical plans that can be emailed to you. I could do without this.

Project Planner  is a nice little planner you can have sent to you for printing out. Again, not really needed?

To sum up, WoodMaster, is an app that has some promise, but at this point, doesn’t live up to it’s high price. Some moderate revising would make it a good app – but at half the price.

Get it:  Website    iTunes

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Mahogany table, by Dave Richards

Woodworking, as in any business, requires that you have tools at your disposal that the other guys don’t have, in order to beat them to getting customer dollars. I’m not talking about a dedicated mortiser here, but “tools” outside of the shop, such as marketing, great designs, technical skills, contacts, and such. I’m blessed, in many respects, that I was able to bring a lot of great tools to this profession – a good eye for design, website savvy, a great mentor, creativity, and others. However, I do have a secret weapon - SketchUp, a CAD program, free from a company called Trimble (although Google created it).

For those of you somewhat familiar with SketchUp, please come back from running away from your computer while pulling your hair out and yelling hysterically, while I tell you why it’s my secret weapon, and how it gives me a leg up on the most of the rest of my competition…

In my view, successful marketing involves at least one major component: Vision. Vision is being able to get across an idea to a client, in this case woodworking concept. It’s not enough to say, “Yeah, I could build you this nice bookcase with dentil molding, a recessed cove, two arched cabinet doors, in cherry.” Does that sound really enticing to you, if you were the customer? You might be a great woodworker, but I’m sorry, that kind of description doesn’t get across the vision for this project that you have to the potential client. You need to bring excitement, and create a strong desire. Instead, what if you could show him a photo of the bookcase, customized to his specs? If you’re really good, show him a photo of said bookcase installed in his home! You could show him how awesome it would look, and would certainly go a lot farther in closing the sale. Well, with SketchUp, and a rendering software package (both free) you could actually make this happen.

This is the beauty and power, of Sketchup. Not only can you create dead-on mechanical drawings for the shop, and know for certain they will work, you can create photo-realistic renderings (turning a CAD file into what looks like an actual photo), with no software cost! Change the wood type, move pieces here or there, play with contrasting woods, find weak joint designs, or illogical designs – it’s easy with Sketchup.

Grand Mission Desk by Patrick Ashley

Ah, and there’s the catch – it’s easy for me, now. It sure wasn’t always easy. I actually quit trying to learn it once due to frustration, but thankfully, I picked it back up again and made myself learn it with a For Dummies book, YouTube videos, and help from forums. It wasn’t easy – but it was worth it. I’m a bit new to a rendering program for the SketchUp files, called Kerkythea, but am coming along quite well. The photo in this blog post of the side table, is not real – it exists only on hard drive. A mentor of mine, Dave Richards (a SketchUp authority) made this in SketchUp and rendered it in Kerkythea. You can see the beautifully stained mahogany, and even make out the top coat sheen – a semi-gloss, I’d say. He has the finished piece, and all the parts exploded.

With my Grand Mission Desk, I was able to produce similar results; had I really taken the time, I could have projected this rendering into a real photo, and fool you into thinking this was a real world desk that has been built. As it was, I was only using the rendering to present ideas to a client (he’s buying, by the way), and I wanted to keep the “set” low-key, focusing on the piece, obviously. I have the ability to show the client the desk at any angle he wants, change wood types or stains – everything is very malleable. Can you see how this could give me a tremendous leg-up on a guy that has just sketched something out on paper, or send a photo of a real desk with an addendum, “Just imagine it a little higher, with corbels under the top, and in cherry.”

Yeah, thought so!

So there you have my secret weapon. It’s a challenge to learn, yes, but I really am very happy that I did take the time and pains to do so.