Good Clean Fun: Misadventures in Sawdust at Offerman Woodshop

by Nick Offerman

We don’t rest until we have hung sash windows in our tree houses, which then causes us to be labeled as “troubled.” That is, until it begins to rain and we can close the windows and keep our comic books from getting wet, at which point we are then considered “gifted.”

The problem with paying a scenic carpenter to do lasting work in your home is that he/she is perhaps not so good at building it well but is instead very good at imbuing the work with the facade of quality through any number of aesthetic tricks, usually involving toothpaste. So my work was pretty spotty at this point, but at least I was cheap.

As long as the working status of my hands remains intact, please let me remain a pupil.

As Wendell Berry tells us in his essay “Poetry and Marriage”: “It may be . . . that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”

(we made effective slingshots, spears, and swords, but my specialty was the PVC-pipe blowgun with poisonous darts of tape and trim nail—evildoers [sisters], beware!).

eldritch

One scroll translates: “The teacher and the student walk the same path,” which moves me deeply. I can see him far ahead of me on the path, and he has also left me a trail of whimsical breadcrumbs that delight and nourish me.

The secret to working with wood is to simply understand and love the personality of the wood.

Robert Penn puts it so well in his delectable book The Man Who Made Things Out of Trees: “The pleasure we take from things made from natural materials is an extension of the pleasure we take from nature itself.”

Given our dwindling natural resources, it seems only decent that we make everything we have the time and means for and imbue our objects with a timeless quality that can serve generations to come.

We love to get our heads together on any question, whether it concerns woodworking or animal husbandry or romance (a redundancy in some regions).

turn an inventory of blackjack-like cudgels on your small lathe, then sell them to the weaker children at your school so that they can wield them to ward off the bullies on the playground. Use your earnings to improve your shop. You’ll be making a buck and performing a valuable public service. Now, if you happen to be a bully yourself, you obviously won’t want to be arming your victims against you, so I would instead recommend you learn to turn some cool wooden pens and stop being a jerk. Nobody likes a bully, pal.

Chances are you might find a neighbor, or building super, or handyman/-woman who knows an available spot for projects in the parking structure, on the roof, or in the steam tunnels. I have found that if one exhibits an interest in back-scratching by, say, helping a groundskeeper to rake leaves, then you might find yourself with access to some tools, a workbench, or even a bit of teaching. The worst thing you’ll have made is a new friend. (If, on the other hand, the person looks at you strangely whilst wielding some rope in a “snaring” motion, then best not follow her to the steam tunnels.)

There are more ways to hurt yourself in a woodshop than there are whiskers on my chin, and I am very hirsute:

I have caught just such a piece of walnut right above my pubic bone that left me on my fanny on the floor, doubled in half, thanking the wood nymphs that I wasn’t about six inches taller. Preventing kickback must command a great deal of your focus whenever you use the table saw.

Famously, woodworkers hate sanding more than any other activity in the shop, but I often love this process, apparently because I am dumb. Sure, it can get super monotonous, at which time it’s important to be good at meditating or at least whistling, but it’s during the sanding that a project often goes from good-looking to gorgeous. Especially when you’re close to done and you wet the wood to raise the grain before final sanding—you have removed all the machining and tool marks, and you get to see the saturated color and figure for the first time—it’s one of the most magical moments in working with wood.

They say a woodworker can never have enough clamps. By gum, I believe I am the one to have beaten the idiom. If I don’t have enough clamps then I am in some deep trouble, because it means I must have a job coming up that will require more than the seven thousand I seem to have acquired.

If you’re at all like me (an ardent reader of Tolkien), then you have felt a certain sentience from trees when standing in their quiet, majestic presence. When sliced portions of those noble structures then occupy your bench, there is a natural wisdom retained in the organic cells. Although the tree itself is no longer living, the cells never stop breathing, as it were, in their perpetual tendency to expand and contract with the relative humidity in the air around them. Each piece of wood has a personality, even boards harvested from different parts of the same tree, and in its particular attributes and behavior, the wood will speak to you (“I like to lie straight!” “I like to get all curly!” “Ha! I refuse to cooperate, foolish human.”).

Woodworking has everything to do with learning to listen to your material and then doing your best to cooperate with its requirements (shucks, that’s actually pretty good marriage advice as well—if you sweeten it up a bit).

the most savory moment of any project is when I have successfully constructed my piece, scraped and sanded it to a finish-ready level, and I wipe on the first coat of oil. It is at this moment that the voice of Gandalf resounds in my head—a reverberating “Well done, Master Offerman.”

If sustainably maintained, a stand of hardwood trees actually benefits from careful thinning, known in England as maintaining a coppice.

Saw cuts

Simply put, wood is made up of organic fibers that run up and down the tree like drinking straws. I always encourage people to imagine a handful of uncooked spaghetti. If you imagine that spaghetti soaked with water, you know that it won’t increase in length nearly as much as it will increase in width—or, put another way, the strands get much fatter than they grow longer. Thus, when the humidity increases, wood fibers drink in water from the air and expand. When the humidity drops, the wood expels water and consequently contracts. This is why the doors and windows in your home might stick shut during humid seasons whilst they swing freely when it’s dry outside.

if you pet a cat’s fur from head to tail, the hair lies down naturally and the cat likes it. If you rub your hand from tail to head, however, it’s unnatural and awkward, the hair fibers stand up uncomfortably, and the cat does not like it, at least most of the cats I have known. They call that ill-advised petting rubbing the cat “against the grain.” This is because “they” have read my chapter, this very one you’re delighting in right now. (I have heard tell of cats that actually enjoy this petting “against nature,” and they are actually legally prohibited from using litter boxes in some southern states, but perhaps that will be covered in the next book.)

It’s a great talent to be able to design whole rooms so that they look like works of art. I am probably so attracted to unaltered wood tones partially because I have no eye for design myself. My wife, Megan, did our entire house, soup to nuts, and it looks so incredibly good I would think someone much handsomer would live there. Please don’t give her any ideas. Of course, our favorite professional designers are the ones who create their palette around our work, because those are the rooms in which our furniture gets to be the leading lady.

That means you’re paying extra for a wood surface that’s probably less than mediocre at best, on lumber cut to dimensions you didn’t get to weigh in on! When I first learned to mill my own material, I felt such a powerful sense of liberation from the corporate overlords of BIG TIMBER.

A board foot is another animal altogether. It takes into account the thickness, width, and length of a board.

We often just send each other pictures of beautiful vintage tools that we come across, like soldiers in the war sending pinups of movie starlets. Trust me, nobody was ever half as inspired by Betty Grable as Jimmy and I are by a Northfield jointer from the 1960s.

There are few places I love to hang out more than a workshop where great work is being done.

He says that if you want to make a living at it, you just have to throw yourself into the effort, to get dirty and make mistakes, so that you can learn how to avoid the mistakes as quickly as possible.

Becksvoort makes no bones about using the right tool to get the job done quickly, and that is more important to a woodshop’s success than any romantic vision of a quaint, unplugged “woodwright’s shop” ever could be.

For this paddle I am using some blanks made (by Matty) from all the red oak trim that was stripped from the set of Parks and Recreation when the show ended. Between the windows and doors and baseboards and more . . . that was a lot of custom-milled trim that was going to end up in a landfill. That this wood should then have randomly fallen off a truck in front of my particular shop, out of all the woodshops in the world, is an astonishing coincidence for which I am deeply grateful.

If you’re anything like me (“hobbit” handsome but clumsy as an O. J. Simpson alibi),

It would have to be argued that he did indeed revolutionize the design and construction, but the project perhaps took a little longer than he anticipated, since he is still at it now, some forty-five years later. Woodworkers and boatbuilders never seem to be able to finish tinkering with tools and techniques, likely because that itself is the most delicious part—the tinkering. We always yearn to see if we can do better next time.

as he says, “It’s frustration that is actually the mother of invention. . . . If it starts to go off the rails, we are forced to be creative and usually end up with a better solution than we started with.”

Ted has a great take on this and describes it thus: It is the defects in wood and in people that give them depth and make them interesting. They both take thought and patience to work with, but the rewards outweigh the effort. Let the wood (or people) speak—it will tell you what it wants and what it will let you do to it. Force it and it breaks; slowly steam it and it bends. A wild grain will be ornery to work and unstable, but cut it in half and book-match it and the beauty fills your senses. Straight grain is predictable and will stay where you put it; but aside from the engineering properties, there is nothing that excites. I see people this way—might be why all the people I respect, admire, or love are beautiful people with their own kind of crazy.

This is another intangible benefit to woodworking. Whether you have made a spoon or a canoe paddle, when you hand it to a person and they say, “How did you do this?” as though you have learning in the ways of wizardry, it brings forth a welling of pride that I can’t describe. I can only encourage you to seek out that feeling for yourself, because it feels pretty darn special.

As Dad said, “There is more than one way to do a job wrong.” I believe he was looking at me.

That’s not to say he eschewed machines, but he preferred hand-planed surfaces; organic, clean, flowing lines; and little to no finish. As a young man he worked for a ship’s chandler and always found inspiration in the “fair” lines of boats: “There’s hardly a straight line on them, but there’s harmony. People think right angles produce harmony, but they don’t. They produce sleep.”

just drifting among them as they work, “suggesting subtle nuggets” like “stay sharp” (keep your tools sharp, especially near the end when your momentum entices you to press on in dullness).

Sharkey HIRSUTE SCALE: Gimli CARD GAME: Shoot the Moon MATH CLUB OR BAND: Both PETS: One dozen American centaurs, two dogs, two cats, five chickens, and one clone (me) ILLUMINATI LEVEL/STATURE: Vulcan IV BURRITO ORDER: Breakfast with steak FAVORITE WOOD: Barn timber SLAB CRIBBAGE BOARD

When I first read of his act of defiance, I too, like any fledgling woodworker, was feeling the oppression of the “proper” techniques to which I was being told to adhere. I’m all for learning the right way to do things, but part of the apprentice’s satisfaction when achieving mastery is found in emphatically thumbing one’s nose at one’s teacher and then going one’s own way.

To me, that is the sentiment of an artist who is in the batter’s box taking swings. He won’t hit it out of the park on every pitch, but his passion makes even his foul balls works of genius.

It just goes to show that if you make things with the right people, including the making of a good time, you might suddenly find yourself with no need to go to the mall ever again.