About : standard furniture atlanta
Title : standard furniture atlanta
standard furniture atlanta
voiceover: the woodwhisperer is sponsored by festool. faster, easier, smarter. and by powermatic. the gold standard since 1921. (music) marc: it's a pleasure to be in your shop this is awesome, and ithink people are going to really enjoy seeingan inside peek to it.
a major editor's actual home shop is going to be pretty cool. but before we get into all that, i just kind of wanted you to give us ... i mean, i know some of this stuff because i read your book. and if anyone hasn't read it, you should. workbenches ... what's the subtitle?
chris: blah, blah, blah. yada, yada, yada. it's blue, bluish gray. chris: the blue one. marc: buy the blue one. it's a very good book. but as far as your history and how you got where you are now,if you could just give us the, you know, 30 to 40 second run down
of your life in 30 to 40 seconds. and how you got to thepoint that you are now, working for popular woodworking. chris: yeah. i started off buildinghouses on our family farm with my dad and we didn'thave any electricity on the shop. marc: wow. chris: on the site.
and so it was all handsaws and brace and bit and really miserable and i hated it. i wanted santa clausto bring me a circ saw. marc: (laughing) okay. chris: and a five milelong extension cord. marc: right. chris: but he didn't. and so we built thefirst house without power and then we got power after that and built
the second one and that really got me into working with wood and really, right after college, even though i had become a newspaper reporterand i was chasing fires and chasing ambulancesand chasing whatever, i was learning to build furniture at night and building out on the back porch with a circ saw, a jigsaw, allmy grandfather's old stuff. and building furniture to fill our house
just like everybody else. and after a few years of being a newspaper reporter i realized, you know, i really would just love to dothis woodworking stuff and find a way to use both my skills. i only have two. marc: (laughing) both of them. chris: i'm a man so i have one feeling and two skills.
marc: okay. chris: so don't hurt my feeling. marc: (laughing) all right. chris: and my two skillswhich were woodworking and writing. and saw an ad in the sunday paper for popular woodworking andthat was 12 years ago. and they have not been able to get rid of me since.
marc: that's a good thing, i think. i think everybody's benefited from ... just the contributionsyou've made have been great. i guess, in terms of what you now do, your daily activities at work. you're consuming this stuff constantly. not just consuming it, you'reproducing it constantly. and you're drowning inwoodworking content, so to speak.
and here we are in your home shop. you know. how does that work for you? are you able to unplug and separate that which you do atwork, come home, and still enjoy your time here and just have fun like the rest of us do when we get- well, i say we but i'm no longer in that work force anymore.
chris: you are one of us. marc: i'm one of these guys. but, you know, when you come home 6:00, are you coming in theshop or, you know, is it just something you just don't want to see anymore at that point? that's a good question. it's funny because, you know, my affection for the craft has beendifferent from the way
i've seen a lot of pros. i'm not a pro. i mean, i do build a few commission pieces every year, but it's not what i do. marc: it's a special circumstance, really. chris: yeah, yeah a friend of a friend. somebody wants somethingspecial and i want to build it anyway, i do that. but i really come at it from the amateur
point of view and the funny thing was, is that, when i started i hated it. it was like, my dad was, you know ... it was like i had to go, i couldn't play with my friends, i couldn't,you know, i couldn't go out causing trouble- marc: yeah. chris: and this, that, or the other. i had to down at thefarm sawing two by 12's
for joists and hated it. i wanted nothing to do with it. so i would never haveanything to do with wood. but there's something in the blood and it's just gottenworse every year for me. you can ask my wife and it's ... the trajectory towards total obsession has been- marc: worse or better?
chris: it's accelerated. yeah, well it depends on me or her. marc: (laughing) right. chris: i mean, my typical day is i get up, you know, at 5:15. i'm in the office by 7:00. i'm, you know, working there until 4:00. come home, make thekids and my wife dinner, help with some homework,help with the baths,
and then either i amdesigning on the computer for the next issue, you know, some sort of piece in cad, or tryingto catch up on email. or i'm down here buildingand it is a still working shop and it's always a little bit of a mess and i just,i relish every minute i have down here and ionly see it getting worse. sorry lucy. marc: pretty humble beginnings as far as
the tools you started with and i think a lot of people ... i don't know if it's ... well, i guess because a lot of what you focus on is hand tools so there's an assumption that you'rejust a hand tool guy. you know, you don't owna table saw, you actually cut everything with a hand saw. but i see a pretty good compliment of your
standard power tools that we would expect in a modern woodworking shop. how is the situation, howwould you describe it now? you really are a powertool person as well, sort of a hybrid of power tool, hand tool usage, right? marc: and, i mean, howhas that changed things for you coming from the humble beginnings to what is available to us now?
well, i started off in hand tools and then i got a few power tools, thank god, from my grandfather. and was able to build some things. and power tools reallyaccelerate your learning curve, they allow you to do things you probably shouldn't be able to do or be allowed to do. but, you know, for me, in the end, i don't
understand anybody who is in one camp or the other. i don't understand theall power tool people anymore than i understandthe all hand tool people. because, for me, there is this richness that you can get fromcombining the two perspectives. you get the speed andthe labor saving devices when you're trying tosurface stock, but you're getting the fine detailsfrom the hand tools
that the power toolsjust aren't capable of. marc: mm hm, yeah. chris: and, for me, youknow, i'm trying to turn areas of that i dislikedoing, like sanding for six hours on a project, into something i really enjoy doing. which is, like, planing for,you know, a couple hours. marc: sure. chris: so i'm justreally trying to maximize
pleasure, i'm just a totalwoodworking hedonist. and also, you get to buy more tools. i mean, it's like, you know, you get to just not buy the sander, you get to also buy the smoothing plane and you get to buy this, that, or the other. so it's all about the crack. marc: that it is. do you think people are ata disadvantage these days?
i think most people, whereas you began with hand tools and worked your way up and you created theneed for the power tool. a lot of times, people today ... and i'm certainly guilty of it, i actually went from the opposite direction. i had the money to be able to afford that circular saw, soi bought it right away. i wasn't using hand tools.
do you think that puts modern woodworkers or people who are newto the craft at a little bit of a disadvantage? because they sort ofhave to work backwards in almost a nostalgic kind of fashion to find out what all this stuff does because this is where we start. chris: it can be nostalgiabut it's also ... what i hear from people is that, you know,
a lot of people start out in power tools and a lot of that is influenced by what they see on television. you know, norm abram,who's brought so much to the craft but whoseshow, for the most part at the beginning of his career, really was very power oriented. and that's the way a lotof people came into it and they assumed that that is what they
needed to do. but you get to a pointwhere you hit the wall and it's like, "i can't take my skills "any further until i get a different "set of tools or adifferent set of mindsets." i think people are at apsychological disadvantage because i think inwoodworking, new perspectives, new designs, new tools,it's mostly a mental barrier than it is areal dexterity battle.
i'm quite clumsy and so it's not like, "i'm mr. super fingers." hand tools, the proper handtool, properly tuned up works by itself and youjust have to kind of get out of its way. so i think most people just have to say, "you know what?i'm interested in it." get into it, give themselves a little bit of education.
have someone show them how to sharpen and once they can sharpenit, it's all downhill. i would say in the past year you've gone from sort of mild-manneredhumble woodworking editor, to the schwarz. that's quite a transitionand why blogging? you seem to be very proactive in the world of blogging and i think,you know, you sort of set the standardfor what a high quality
woodworking blog should look like and what it should do. where's the fuel behindthat because sometimes you see in certain oldmedia, they're a little resistant to some of these new things. you guys seem to embrace it. so is this just a personal thing because of your addiction, it's another way to get it out there or is theresomething else there?
what's ... chris: (sighs) well,there's a couple things. one thing is, when you have new young woodworkers coming intothe craft, i want to provide some sort of outlet for them on the internet wherethey can find a source of information that says, "you know what? "handwork is okay andhandwork is a perfectly "acceptable part of, youknow, any sort of shop."
and so by providing thatoutlet, i'm hopefully getting some people into it who will not just automatically go the power tool route but will try to blend both. but really, the blogs, as much as they are a good vehicle for the magazine, is that, you know, i'm a professional writer. and i came up in newspapers where i would produce two, sometimesthree stories a day.
chris: and so it was really hard for me to go into the magazine world to kind of pinch that off. and, you know, to atrophythat because it's like, i just was trained to write like a demon. and i can't not do it. and so the magazine, there's only like, two pounds of crap and,like, 100 pounds of crap that has to go in there.
when i have the blog, it's like an outlet for everything. and i can be much more free form about it. i don't have to be as rigid as when i'm writing for the magazine. and also, you know,the readers egg you on. i'm sure you know that. marc: (laughing) yeah. chris: is that, you know, once they get
jazzed about it, you feed back on it and it's just like it's an endless cycle of how much more can you do? marc: yeah, was that aunexpected side effect of all that? i mean, you make the blog,you put the article there, and next thing you know, now you're almost answering to people in some sense by the things you say,the opinions you express,
and the frequency with which you write. you know, it becomes an issue. chris: you're right, it does, and i know you see that too. marc: yeah, yeah. comes with the territory though. chris: it does, but it's a good thing because it means they care. i mean, i didn't know if anybody would
read a woodworking blogwhen we first put it up three years ago. you know, nobody even,really in our company knew what a blog was. and now we have, i thinkwe have, like 300 of them at our company. it's really changed. but of course, the thing that really has me worried is thatblogging is for old people.
it's really, you know, sort of the social networking side of things and now i've got to start learning facebook and myspace and twitter and all these other things to really keep up with it. marc: it is, it's toughto keep up with it. we're in the thick of it and we still ... we're months behind some of these things. we're like, "everybody knows about this?
"why don't we know about this?" chris: yeah, where did this come from? marc: "we got to do this!" we're always playing catch up. i think it's just the natureof the beast, unfortunately. you know, i would love to get a little quick tour of the shop, starting with this monster, right here. this gorgeous bench.
tell us a little bit about it and i'm sure people will already recognize it. chris: yeah, this is theholtzapffel workbench, which is from an 1875 drawing in an old english book. and it combines a lot ofold school cool features like this under carriagewhere the front leg is flush to the frontedge of the bench top, which allows you to really clamp
anything you need here, or here. anywhere you need to go. the top is fairly thick, it's more than three inches so i don't have to have any apron under there,so i can clamp things. chris: but mostly what ireally love about this thing is, like, the big twin screw. is having 24 inches ... hey, i can say that.
(laughter) having 24 inches between allows me to put a whole case side inthere and just dovetail away and i don't have to come up with some crazy rigging to do that. and this thing just hasa grip like a monster. marc: i believe it. chris: i mean, i couldprobably punish my children by putting their hands in there.
but that's the major number one feature of this bench that's just really awesome. and this is made fromsome curly ash that was cut here, locally. i always try to use locals woods. and then some birdseyethat i had sticking around. so it's a little flashy. it's not southern yellow pine but it's for my house, i can do that.
marc: you can indulge yourself a bit. chris: i can indulge myself. marc: is this your current favorite design at this point or have you moved on to another love (laughs)? chris: i try to stay trueas long as i can, marc. actually, i mean, i've really fallen for the twin screw andwhat i probably want is more ...
like, would end up if i hadto do it all over again, would be a bench that'skind of like what's in the dominy shop at winterthur which is a really long bench thatlooks like the roubo. you know, big thicklegs like a french tree and then a big twin screwon it for dovetailing. and that's probably thebench i would end up with in the end but this thing works so well and i don't have a 12 footspace, as you can see-
chris: in my cinder block paradise. the other thing that's also cool about this wall that i really like is that that's sort of myshrine to tony nielson and all the other people that i give all my money to. marc: i just got lightheaded. chris: yeah, i know, i know. i always see it a littlebit too, and i go,
"ahh!" marc: that's very cool. chris: yeah, like thisis one of wayne anderson planes that he made for me. this is, like, sort of a15th, 16th century plane. chris: and really cool. everybody things thisacanthus leaf is really weak but if you feel it,it's really kind of ... it's really stout.
marc: no, that's study. chris: yeah, but that'sa cool little plane and, yeah. that's what i spend my money on and- marc: gorgeous. chris: yeah, well. it is. but, no i keep all the planes up here and then i can just, you know, reach here.
i like having everything at hand's reach so i never have to take half a step. because pretty much all ... once everything getsthrough the assembly phase which is in the machinesbehind me, everything takes place right here. so i can, you know, reach in here for a lot of the little tools that are less frequently used and then up on the wall
for the tools that i use just (snapping) every day, all the time. marc: sure, yeah. chris: and then i keep a band saw ... i keep a band saw by thebench because, i mean, it's probably my favorite power tool. and if i only had to have one machine, it would probably be a band saw. marc: cool.
chris: and that's one of my favorites that i rehabbed. that's actually an old piece of machinery from the 70's. marc: old rockwell, huh? nice. chris: yeah, actually we found it in an old hardware store. it'd been sitting in thereunused, new in the box.
it was still a littlerusty but it's only got like a year's worth of work on it and it's a 1970, so it's pretty cool. the rehab is great, it looks fantastic. chris: well thanks, thanks. marc: yeah, it looks good. chris: and then, like, a uni saw with a sliding table. sliding table's one of my things that i
just can't work withoutonce you've used one. you don't know how people work with miter gauges and i don't understand how i did for so long, just dealing with big repetitive cross cuts. chris: and back there is the joiner which is an old powermatic, american made. marc: eight inch, looks like. chris: eight inch powermatic.
and, also i hope you ... i don't know if you cansee it, but the wine making class results are down there too. (laughs) the wood rack is kind of fun. my first wood rack collapsed one night when we were watching television. it sounded like the world was dying. marc: oh no.
chris: and then backthere are the other tools on that wall behind the shelving unit that i'm installing this week. the planer which i rollout when i need it. the miter saw for knocking down stuff and doing some mitering,though most mitering i do by hand. chris: but really- and a mortiser.
that's the other tool that i'm just, like, really totally in love with. when you're building artsand crafts furniture, like, especially. marc: ugh, it's indispensable. chris: yeah, it's kind of like, you could hand mortise it, butyou're just asking for it. voiceover: storage. chris: oh yeah, well.
marc: rafter clamp storage. chris: yeah, i didn'tfinish the top for that, so. yeah, these are fairly okay i think is the nicest thing to say about them. they look really good. more than they clamp. but that's really about it. some festool stuff. i sprung for the domino and love that
and also the little ct15 which is just a great little vacuum. chris: and that's mygrandfather's bench, actually. marc: oh wow. chris: brought back over the mountains- marc: that's awesome. chris: from his shop in connecticut and- chris: it's cool to have. it's not so good to use.
which was what's kind of set me down my path, but i stilllike to keep it around. marc: that's great. marc: it's good to seethe use of a tight space, a relatively tight space. and you got to get a good work flow, you got to get a goodset up and arrangement from one tool to the next and it's great to see the blend of handtools and power tools.
i think that's wheremost people should aim, you know, to get themost out of their time in the shop. chris: i like to think so. i mean, i'm really happyhere and i can't imagine ... i haven't changed this set up for three or four years now, soi'm pretty well settled. that's a long time in shop time. everybody rearranging all the time.
marc: yeah it's- chris: it's like makeover time. marc: that's just partof the hobby, i think. chris: and the one other thing i'll add about small shops thati really like, is that i've also worked in a lot of big shops with other people and there's a lot of walking around in big shops. where you're like-
marc: 10 feet between each tool. chris: yeah, or you forgot your square over up at the bench and so it's up there and back, you know,three or four times a day whereas here, you know, i've really liked the tightness wherei'm just going from ... you know, all the stock comes in the door, get's processed there,and then it just goes across the table sawand then it's back here
at the bench for assemblyand then final assembly goes right back at the door. and i'm never more than five or six steps away from where i need to be. i like to keep it tight. marc: i think there'sa little misconception about how much space youreally need to survive, you know, and i think ... i don't know, i knowin our space sometimes
having too much open space without a wall or some kind of a divider, it's actually hard to arrange your tools. i think having wallsand corners and things give you really good convenient places to come up with creative solutions. if you just have a big open space you tend to waste a lot of space, i think, so. marc: so, well, i guess that's pretty much
it, we appreciate yourtime and we've enjoyed our little trip to ohio. nicole's nodding her headbut you can't hear her. yeah, but we just wantedto thank you guys. it was awesome, and well, i guess we'll be seeing you on the interwebs. on the intertubes. chris: thanks marc, i appreciate it man. marc: yeah, thank you.
chris: all right. (quiet guitar music) marc: what's it like tohave the wood whisperer in your shop? chris: i think that one of the ... the child crapped herself(laughter) when it happened. it's pretty fricking awesome. i mean, i mean, we'vehad to keep the people outside at bay and we're running out
of police tape. i almost crapped myself when it happened. it was cacophonous. marc: you know, it's ... what are you going to do? yeah, we don't have makeovers. marc: this isn't about me. this is about chris.