Perfect 'Enough'?

"Sometimes almost perfect is perfect enough."

That's a quote from Friday morning, when one of the second-year students, Josh, was presenting a beautiful bench he designed and built as a quick project to start off the year. I say quick, but he still put about 50 hours of hard work into the piece, which was a commission for a friend.

Josh was describing the concept, the clients' desires for the piece, and the setting where it would live -- in a busy part of a family home with young children.

He also talked about the challenges he faced with the project, and some of the mistakes he made and  a couple of aspects of the finished product where he felt he could have perhaps done better.

That's when Laura Mays, one of our instructors and the director of the program, spoke up and said Josh was being a bit hard on himself. She suggested the piece was perhaps not perfect, but was easily perfect enough for its purpose.

Woodworkers, especially those that come out of this program, can become a bit OCD about their work, with the tendency to sometimes toil endlessly in pursuit of a level of perfection that isn't always necessary, financially viable, or even possible.

Part of the purpose of this whole becoming-a-woodworker thing, Laura seemed to be saying, is learning to recognize when it's time to simply stand back, be satisfied, and say 'ship it!' before moving on to the next project.

More on the whole idea of 'perfection' in woodworking coming soon in a future post...

Josh presenting his bench in the shop at College of the Redwoods.

The Fine Art of Sharpening

One of the first things we learned at College of the Redwoods was how to sharpen tools, as well as the why and the when.

There’s a very specific process that begins with flattening the back of a chisel or plane blade. And by flattening, I mean just that. Taking a piece of flat iron, factory cut, and scraping it across three or more stones of varying coarseness for literally hours on end to remove any bumps or hollows.

Even the tiniest discrepancy in that surface will affect the performance of the blade. In a plane blade, it will cause it to sit unevenly against the chip breaker, meaning the blade will be at an angle where it protrudes from the sole of the plane, and it will always be a challenge to make that blade cut the way it was intended to – smoothly, evenly, taking tiny, gossamer-thin shavings from the surface of a board and leaving behind a glimmering, glowing surface.

With a chisel, the effect will be similar. The back of the chisel is the reference surface for every cut it makes. If that reference surface is crowned, cupped, or otherwise uneven, it will be that much harder to get a sharp, clean cut, such as when chopping dovetails or cleaning out a mortise.

Those hours and hours of work, hunched over a bench, scraping a blade against a wet stone, eventually, somehow result in a surface that is smooth, flat, and shines or reflects like a mirror. It’s a beautiful thing.

But it’s also just the start. Next, the blade must actually be sharpened – another lengthy process that takes time and energy and a lot of care and attention to get right.

But when it’s all done properly, the process results in a kind of alchemy – a piece of steel becoming so much more – a tool that can help an artist or craftsman create beautiful, lasting, meaningful things.