Two Approaches to Woodworking

Nowadays I find myself increasingly put off by most Western youtube videos, articles and books on woodworking, primarily because woodworking there appears to be centred on the table saw. Apart from cutting wood to size, the table saw is used for making joints, mouldings and much more. For all this there are a bewildering variety of jigs, dado sets and what have you.

An aspiring woodworker in India faced with all this will be permanently put off with woodworking unless of an engineering bent of mind and gifted with deep pockets. Woodworking seems to have drifted so far from a craft to another sub discipline of engineering that it no longer seems possible to pursue within the confines of the average home.

Don't get me wrong: Table saw centric woodworking is not wrong or to be despised; it is accurate, repeatable and requires virtually no skill, simply the ability to mechanically follow one step after another.

This is the industrial world's way of doing things: de-skilling, systematising and enabling high consistency in output. This kind of woodworking definitely has its place - but not, in my opinion, in the average Indian home.

I do not scoff at industrialised woodworking; this approach with the table saw at its core and other machines such as planers, thicknessers, shapers, drum sanders and bandsaws at its side, has led to the mass production of wood products and made them available cheaply to consumers.

Products churned out at industrialised woodworking workshops are often perfect, identical and very often beautifully designed. They cannot be shrugged off or disdained.

My grouse is with the notion that woodworking necessarily means acquiring a huge table saw, enormous jointers and so on. Every time I see a woodworking video with large machines doing the work, I switch off.

I recently bought a book on making boxes, small ones, and was dismayed to find that the author assumed the reader has a table saw and could therefore follow his mechanical instructions.

Christopher Schwarz    blog.lostartpress.com

Paul Sellers    http://paulsellers.com

Shannon Rogers    http://www.renaissancewoodworker.com

Roy Underhill    http://www.woodwrightschool.com/

Increasingly, however, I find there is a growing set of artisans in the West advocating a different, non-industrialised approach to the craft.

I find myself drawn to woodworkers like Paul Sellers, Christopher Schwarz, Roy Underhill and Shannon Rogers, who are all hand tools craftsmen. They might use power tools but their approach is that of artisans and not industrial workers. I find that a relief.

The artisan with hand tools skills can often produce as good if not better objects than engineered in an industrial workshop.

One of my favourite youtube.com channels is that of Doucette and Wolfe Furniture Makers (url: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjatELwdjLj3_03Q80iTc_g). It is fascinating to watch them making super quality furniture. After watching them at work I really feel that nothing can match human skill.

With a set of relatively sharp tools, right techniques and some skill, the aspiring home woodworker can craft beautiful objects out of wood. The process is as important as the end result.

Paul Sellers , in a recent blog, wrote "if you are like me, you imagine a future lifestyle working your hands in your craft and a new life unfolding in the lives of others. You imagine sane afternoons and evenings with your sons and daughters, your wife and your husbands enjoying banter back and forth as you build a new dining table or a new bed. These are the things industrialists know nothing of without making it a money-making enterprise. I think that this is why I do what I do and it's why people follow my classes at the castle and the videos we make for the future of future generations."

Indranil Banerjie
26 June 2015