One of my favorite movies of all time is Edward Zwick’s 1989 work Glory.  It is the retelling of the story of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment during the US Civil War.  The 54th was the first all black regiment to take the field in battle, and they proved themselves brave warriors as they attempted – and failed – to take Fort Wagner which guarded the city of Charleston, South Carolina.

One of the most poignant moments in the film was when Col. Robert Shaw (Played by Matthew Broderick) stood by the flag bearer at the head of the column of soldiers just before the climactic battle and asked, “Should this man fall, who will pick up the flag?”

Why was this so important?  Sure, the flag is the symbol of a nation, and as such, it shouldn’t touch the ground as a sign of respect.  But, that’s not the main reason why Shaw asked for a volunteer.

Back in the days before field radios and instant satellite communications, it was a difficult job commanding men in battle.  So, the commanders for different units had to rely on two tools.  The first was the bugle’s call.  By having a bugler sound a different tune, the soldiers on the field were able to tell if they had to retreat or advance.  The second – and probably even more  important – tool the commanders used was the standard bearer.  By hoisting the unit’s colors high in the air, the soldiers were able to tell where their unit was headed, and if they were still in formation during the attack. That flag guided their movements and helped them stay on track.

Knowing that importance, opposing forces were quick to locate the standard bearer and gun him down.  By doing this, they could easily thrown their opponents into disarray, possibly turning the tide in battle. Being the standard bearer was a very dangerous occupation.

2009 has been a tough year for woodworkers.  We have seen the passing of two woodworking legends, and the end of an era on television.

Sam Maloof was a truly inspired genius when it came to the craft.  From his California workshop, Sam let his vision guide his work for more than 60 years.  Even until his final days, Sam’s skill and  love for wood poured out into the creations he planned and assembled.  Primarily known for the sinuous curves of his rocking chairs, his designs graced the White House as both presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Regan each owned one.  He was described by the Smithsonian Institution as “America’s most renowned contemporary furniture craftsman” and People magazine dubbed him “The Hemingway of Hardwood.” But his business card always said “woodworker.” “I like the word,” he told a Los Angeles Times reporter, his eyes brightening behind large, owl-eyed glass frames. “It’s an honest word.”

A few months later, we bid farewell to James Krenov. This Siberian-born woodworker started woodworking back in the mid 1920’s, when an airplane dropped supplies for his town in his family’s new  new Alaskan home.  In this package, he found a jack knife and began carving toys for himself and other children.  As the handmade aesthetic had nearly died out in the 1950’s, James was one of the standard bearers for a return to the honest, well-built projects turned out by talented woodworkers today.  His seminal 1976 work A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook helped to light the fire and bring woodworking back to the fore.  It remains one of his most popular works.  He helped establish the woodworking program at the College of the Redwoods, which instructed a new generation of notable woodworkers.

While not a death, last week’s announcement that the New Yankee Workshop will cease production proved to be the talk of woodworking forums across the Internet.  Norm Abram and Russ Morash broke ground the first time in 1979 with This Old House, and in again when they launched the New Yankee Workshop in 1988.  Sure, there were the questions.. who would watch one guy build furniture in his shop for half an hour?  Apparently, lots of folks.  Norm’s easy-going attitude and communication ability gave woodworkers the inside look at how furniture is made.  Always dressed in his plaid with tool belt strapped around his waist, Norm exhorted woodworkers to get out and build safely.  There is little doubt that many woodworkers today got their start in the craft while sitting in their easy chair watching the show.

We now enter into a new era in woodworking.  Many of the old masters who brought the craft out of the sterile 1950’s are getting up there in age.  Sam Maloof, James Krenov, George Nakashima, Tage Frid… they are passing on, leaving memories and their written – and spoken – words for future generations to learn from.  Speculation is that the 21-year run of the New Yankee Workshop was halted by the current economic conditions and a lack of sponsorship money.

These two men and this one show carried the banner for woodworkers, showing them that yes, you can do this and yes, you will improve if you stick with it and invest the time to work at it.

Who now will pick up  the flag?

After reacting to the shock of the two passings and show cancellation, the next post typically asked the most logical next question – who will take their places?

Of course the answer is no one… Krenov and Maloof were pioneers and visionaries.  Their styles are as famous and imitated as those from the Shakers and the Arts and Crafts movement.  The New Yankee Workshop broke ground and laid the path for televised craftsmen such as David Marks and Scott Phillips.

However, the same question also has a logical answer – it’s right under your nose.  The computer you are working on right now is a doorway to the rich online woodworking world.  Woodworking blogs, written by many gifted craftsmen and women, have sprung up across the net.  This is where the next woodworking standard bearer will be discovered.

In many ways, the Internet is far superior to TV programming.  For instance:

• The cost to get started in blogging and podcasting is insanely cheap.. when compared to the cost of equipping a full-blown TV production set.
• You can dial in your interests precisely. If you love the router, you will find websites that deal with that tool.  Turning?  Yep. Hand tools?  You betcha.

• The content is available 24 hours a day.  You can subscribe to the RSS feeds from several different sites and review the new content as it is posted.  This beats watching the same TiVo’d show over and over for a week until the next program comes along.
• And, most importantly, regardless of the economic conditions, web woodworking contributors can continue to post, where TV programming needs the infusion of cash to keep the show on the air.

With the changes in technology, the arrival of High-Def visual programming has arrived. Today’s powerful computers and high-bandwidth Internet connections make the fast and easy access of programming a piece of cake. And, as woodworking web contributors continue to target their audiences and hone their video and audio production skills, the quality of the programming will only rise.

Maloof and Krenov carried the banner through some of the roughest times for woodworkers, and their contributions will never be forgotten.  And, even though the New Yankee Workshop will no longer be producing new shows, the 21 year long body of work will exist in perpetuity on DVD’s and through the ‘measured drahhings.’

But, you have to remember that while these losses seem major, there are hundreds – thousands of woodworkers out there  who are willing to step to the front and answer the question by saying, “I will.”

I just got back from the Woodworking in America hand tool conference, and wow, was that impressive.  The companies making tools, the talented presenters and – most encouraging – the numbers of young woodworkers attending made this past weekend something special.

But, what really got me going was a visit to the vendor’s area very early on Saturday morning.  There, I saw an impressive collection of workbenches tool manufacturers were using to display and demonstrate their wares.

If you don’t have a bench, or are looking to replace one… well, I have some inspiration for you.

Here are a sampling of the benches out in front… some sweet specimens:

I live in Florida.. home of white sandy beaches, unique opportunities to enjoy exotic wild lands and no shortage of theme parks.  You’d think there would be enough destinations to keep my family entertained and occupied on a long holiday weekend…

But, there was one place we hadn’t been yet… And I was excited to go.  This past May, the international furniture giant Ikea opened a massive showroom in Tampa. We also needed a new dresser for my youngest son to stash his clothes in.  Sure, I offered to build it, but my wife convinced me that we should at least go over to take a look at what they had to offer. We headed over this past Saturday to take in the experience.

The first thing that struck me most was the size of the building. Gargantuan.  It looked like you could easily get lost in there.. and I braced myself to take the plunge.  As I walked through the bank of automatic entrance doors, I have to admit that my emotions were mixed. Part of me was excited to see what ideas were there for me to copy in my projects…

The other part felt as if this Swedish chain store was flinging a gauntlet down at me, the home woodworker.  After all, how could I compete with the clean Scandinavian lines and cheap prices by building  at my shop?  I felt compelled to find every fault I could and point it out to my wife to show my superiority in all things wood.

As we got to the top of the escalator, I was pleasantly surprised. The first sets of furniture arrangements in the showroom were impressive. Tasteful. They looked good.

As we took the leisurely stroll through the showroom, the range of furniture offered was very impressive.  Living rooms with clever storage pieces and comfortable chairs and sofas.

Bathrooms that were stylish, yet full of intelligent design features.

Bedrooms that maximized every inch of storage space.

And kitchens like you wouldn’t believe.  No, they didn’t offer dovetailed drawer boxes, but they did have soft close drawers and doors, huge sliding pantries that pulled out revealing dozens of linear feet of storage and all of the amenities you would expect to find in a high-end kitchen.

There was a choice of styles of finishes offered on most furniture.  From traditional frame and panel doors to sleek, sexy modern European finishes, you certainly could modify your kitchen designs to fit your tastes… within reason.

That’s sort of where the Ikea aesthetic started to break down for me.  After a while, I noticed that the choices in finishes started to repeat themselves. You had white, light wood, medium wood and dark wood tones.

There were also some minor imperfections that began to stand out.  For instance, on one of their kitchen designs, the doors had a dark finish on them, but the cabinet insides had a light finish on them.  When the doors were closed, thin lines of light finished wood grain were peeking out from behind the dark doors, ruining the effect.

And, the molding options were limited to one style – a very narrow bull nosed piece across the top. Yes, that is part of the Scandinavian aesthetic, but it’s something that ultimately  limits the look of the pieces. Not every kitchen is going to look complete with such an austere molding detail.

Then, there is the material.  The company keeps costs down by relying solely upon particleboard in their casework pieces.  Granted, it’s not like the ultra cheap particleboard found on the ready to assemble furniture at the local mega mart, but it’s particleboard nonetheless. While the furniture may stand up to use in wet places such as bathrooms and kitchens, there’s a good chance that it may not.  After a few years, the possibility does exists that those sweet looking cabinets might swell if they face an errant water leak – something that good quality cabinet grade ply isn’t going to do.

As I sat in the Ikea cafe eating a plate of Swedish meatballs (It was a heck of a deal for lunch), I began to think about my shopping trip.  Even though there were some shortcomings in the design, the stuff did look to be very high quality.  I found myself less on the defensive and feeling more like there is a place in the universe for custom made furniture and the offerings found in Ikea.  I  can pick and choose what projects I want to build and custom make them out in the shop.

As my wife and I pushed the shopping cart with the flat-packed-dresser-in-a-box we bought for my son out to the van, I was at peace with my decision.  The four drawer dresser cost me only $99, went together in about an hour and a half and does its job admirably.  I doubt that I could build something similar in the same amount of time for about the same price.

Besides, that gave me more time to get into the shop and get working on the projects I have to get done on my honey-do list.

Like any good amusement park, Ikea did have its ups and downs and was quite a bit of fun. But, hey, who wants to live in an amusement park?

Ask people how they define the word ‘recreation’, and you are bound to get wildly differing answers.

For my wife, recreation means taking a folding chair and a sun umbrella down to the beach with a cooler full of cold water and a murder mystery.  She can spend hours just laying back and relaxing.

For me, well, I steer more toward the active. Case in point, I am currently coaching my son’s youth recreational basketball team.

Before I started woodworking eleven years ago, the local rec league was desperate for people to coach, so I stepped in to offer my services. That’s the last time I had coached, and our team did pretty well.  Now, with my son in the 11 – 12 age group and the hurricane speaking tasks slowing down for the season, I stepped up again to take the reins.

My ten-person roster is full of kids of differing motivations, skill sets and levels of experience.  My job is to whip them into a unified team.  But how?

I have been watching some of the other coaches in the league to see how they do their work.  I’ve seen coaches who just want to scrimmage during their practices, playing half their team against the other half.  Then, I’ve seen coaches focus intently on setting up designed plays.  Their players have to remember a bewildering number of play names and learn exactly what they have to do in each situation.

While both approaches have their merit, I have decided to focus heavily on the fundamental steps of playing the game.  After all, I could teach them set plays, but if they understand how to move without the ball, play solid defense and rebound correctly, they can use these skills later on down the road should they continue playing.

In much the same way, I have received a number of e-mails since I started working on Tom’s Workbench from woodworkers just starting out the craft.  “Tom, I’m looking to learn how to cut dovetails.  Can you tell me how to get started?”  “I’ve been trying to build a mission style lowboy for my wife.  I’m not sure how  to begin.”  “My finishing is just awful.  Where am I going wrong?”

I’m not going to claim that I am a woodworking expert – that I have all of the answers for every single problem or question.  In fact, there are still MANY different things that I need to learn myself, and there are still dozens – if not hundreds – of aspects of woodworking I have yet to even touch on.  I’ve only been doing this as a hobby for a little more than a decade.  There’s still much to learn.

One thing I have learned, however, is the method I am approaching my basketball coaching translates very well to working in the shop.  By taking the time to learn the proper fundamentals of different aspects of woodworking, you can more easily master the advanced techniques.

Think about it for a moment.  What do hand cutting tenons and dovetails have in common?  Besides the fact that it involves using a saw and not plugging in a tool, the main skills you must master are marking an accurate line and cutting exactly to it.  Yes, seriously.  That’s exactly what is required to make the joints sound.

So, how do you get that kind of experience?  The answer lies in the punchline to a classic joke tied to New York City.  A young lady gets into a taxi cab and asks the driver, “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?”  The cabbie looks over his shoulder and cracks back, “Practice, kid.”

To get that kind of practice, you should line up a few practice boards of some inexpensive material – poplar, alder, red oak or the like.  Mark a depth line and grab your saw.  See how many dead perpendicular lines you can cut across the width of the board.  When you fill one board’s width, cut that end off and start over.  Look at the results.  Focus on your grip and the flow of motion in your arm.  Look at the results and evaluate your progress.

Do this five or ten minutes every time you go into your shop, and you will hone those skills to the point where cutting advanced joinery will be a piece of cake.

The same can be done  for any number of other essential woodworking skills.  Learning how to use your planes.  Learning how to sharpen your blades. Learning how to properly work a router. Making high quality rip cuts.

Will it be fun?  Maybe not.  After all, our shop time is precious, and we want to spend all of that available time building projects.  But, just as the kids on my team may want to play like LeBron James or Michael Jordan and shoot the lights out, they have to start by learning to do the essential skills properly.  Once the are competent with those basics, the other stuff will start to come more naturally…

After that, hey, the sky is truly the limit.

My days back as a student at the University of Maryland were some I will never forget. Moving away from home for the first time.  Getting along in a large campus and being exposed to many new people holding diverse viewpoints.  And, a class schedule and structure that was very different than it was back in high school.

Basically, college was set up so you attended each of your classes about three hours total a week.  Sounds easy, right?

Well, that was all of the CLASS work you got… the homework, however, took many hours to accomplish.  And, if you didn’t keep up, you were lost in the weeds.

That’s exactly what happened to me the first semester of my Sophomore year.  Inexperience got the better of me.  I thought I had this college thing down pat.  I took a blow-off class everyone told me I could ace even if I didn’t show up.  And, as expected, I blew it off.

That class ended up being the only F I ever got in my entire academic career.   I had failed what is considered one of the easiest classes on campus.  And I was not happy with myself.

Why is it that some woodworkers will look equally hard at their failures? Could it be that they made their goof up on a prize piece of highly figured wood?  Is it that there is only so much time available for woodworking, and that time spend making mistakes is considered time wasted?  Or, is it that they expect that they will never make a mistake – ever?

Certain skills in woodworking require a tremendous amount of practice and skill to execute properly.  One woodworker I know learned how to cut beautiful hand-cut dovetails on his own.  Sure, he watched the videos and read the books.  But, he gained the experience by setting up a stack of scrap wood blanks and cutting one or two sample dovetails a few times each week.

His first attempts looked as if they had been chewed by deranged beavers – gappy and uneven.  But, as he progressed over months of practice, he started to notice where he was making his mistakes.  Maybe he was not holding the saw properly.  Maybe he didn’t have his chisel perfectly perpendicular to the bench.  Maybe he wasn’t marking the cut lines properly.  Whatever the problem, he identified it and figured out a way to correct the issue.

Today, his dovetails are clean, tight and pretty as a picture.

Other woodworkers may be experiencing a fear of failure. Last weekend’s quick poll asked if you had ever bent wood for a project.  Nearly half of those who voted said they never have, but always wanted to.  For those who voted that way, why not?  Hey, I messed up my first attempt at bent lamination.  It’s in my scrap bucket right now, cut into multi-layered pieces waiting for the weather to cool down so it can be burnt in my fire pit.  Instead of saying, “I can’t do this,” I went back to the saw and planer and cut more strips to be laminated into bent pieces.  The results the second time around were much better… and now I’m working on the rest of the project.

What happened after I got that F?  I could have given up and felt sorry for myself, quit college and figured out what my next step was going to be.  Instead, I learned a very valuable lesson about life.  I sat down one afternoon and gave the direction of my college academic career a very stern looking over.  Was I committed to this or not?

I took the report card with the F on it and taped it to the surface of my desk where it stayed through the rest of my Sophomore, Junior and Senior years. Every time I sat down to do homework, I reminded myself what I had done, where I had failed and how I needed to correct my situation.  I studied harder, went to every class and sat in front. I budgeted my time carefully and made sure that I had my studies done before I knocked off for a cold one at the end of the day.

When I went to the mailbox to get my next report card, I just about fainted.  Four A’s and one B.  My best semester ever. I had taken my mistake, learned from it and became a much better student for it.

As woodworkers, I hope each of you takes the mistakes you make and learn from them.  Understand why things went bad, and seek out ways to improve your work.

I remember once reading the signature line of a fellow woodworker on one of the forums I follow – “It’s OK to make mistakes, but it’s to your credit if you don’t make the same ones over and over again.”

So, go make your mistakes boldly.  Learn from them.  You’ll be a much better woodworker for it.