The Decline of the Craftsman

This piece first appeared in December 18th, 2008 edition of the Pioneer Tribune, a weekly newspaper from Manistique, Michigan. Please visit their website: http://www.pioneertribune.com/

During my never-ending quest to clean out and straighten up the mess that I call my workshop, I came across a box containing some pieces of maple that I had purchased 20-odd years ago. I was a young adult, still in my teens, when I bought the maple, and since I was a young adult, there was nothing that I couldn’t do, and I was going to build a drum kit based on an idea I had come across in a magazine for drummers.

It was a simple plan, and to a freshly anointed adult, simple equals easy. It was of no concern to me that I didn’t own one single woodworking tool. After all, I had taken several woodworking classes in high school and I knew how to use all of the tools, if I ever managed to acquire them.
A young adult can also be very proficient at a method of getting things done known as putting the cart before the horse. My drum kit project was no exception.

I went to one of the lumber yards in town to purchase the maple. The clerk behind the counter gave me a slip of paper with my order on it and told me where I could find the maple out in the yard. He also told me that I could have it cut to size in the millwork shop at the other end of the yard. I had no idea what a millwork shop was, but hearing that I could have it cut to the size I needed was music to my ears.

I went into the millwork shop and found two or three old-timers sitting at a table drinking coffee and talking. I told them the dimensions that I needed the maple boards cut to, and they took care of it in short order. If my memory serves me, they were quite happy about cutting up the wood.

I don’t seem to recall paying anything extra to have the wood cut up, but if I did, I’m sure that it wasn’t much. Working with the machines and the wood seemed to be its own reward for these guys. I was sure that was the reason for their happiness.

Later at home, I was looking at the wood and noticed that it wasn’t of uniform thickness. This was a problem. It was important that all of the pieces were of the same thickness. This meant that they would need to be planed down.

Thinking back on it now, I’m sure that the old timers would have been able to plane the maple for me as well. I didn’t know of anyone who owned a planer, and the only one place that I knew that even had a planer was my old high school.

I waited until after school was over one day and walked into my favorite wood shop teacher’s classroom to see if he could help me out. He was glad to see me, and we talked for a while about how life had been treating us. He said that he would be able to plane the wood for me, but I couldn’t tell anyone and I couldn’t make it a habit. No problem, I thought.

After the wood was planed down he asked me if I needed the edges “dressed.” Because I was an all-knowing young adult, I couldn’t admit that I didn’t know what he meant, and it would also show that I hadn’t been paying attention during the lecture part of his classes. I told him it wasn’t necessary and thanked him for his help.

Later on I found out that dressing the edges meant cutting the edges on a machine (called a jointer, which I was familiar with) so that they were smooth and at a perfect 90-degree angle to the face of the wood. This would allow me to glue the edges properly without having irregularities in the joints between pieces. If I wanted the drum kit to look good, this step was as important as the wood having a uniform thickness.

Jointers are even less common than planers, and as a result I had nowhere to turn. I couldn’t go back to my shop teacher; he said not to make it a habit, and more importantly, I would have looked like I didn’t know what I was doing.

That was the end of the drum kit project, and I have been carting those pieces of maple around even since.

Two decades later I find myself in possession of all of the necessary equipment (planer, jointer, etc.) to actually build the drum kit, but I have long since lost interest.

I enjoy woodworking very much, and even though I didn’t always pay attention back in class, those classes proved invaluable at various stages of my life.

Woodworking hasn’t been a career for me, but a lot of the things I learned in woodshop became part of my practical knowledge, and I have been able to apply techniques and principles learned in shop classes to my everyday life.

I can trace my mechanical reasoning and problem-solving skills directly back to my assorted shop classes. These classes taught things in a hands-on way. There were so many ideas that just couldn’t be illustrated any other fashion. These classes taught how things worked and how things worked in unison with other things.

Even though I didn’t pay attention to what was being taught and I was far from being a good student, I learned that you can do an awful lot of things if you just have some imagination. Woodshop was a great place to foster imagination. If you can think it, it can probably be made out of wood. Wood might not always be the best material to use for a project, but you know what I mean.

There was an advertisement in the local papers some time ago announcing that the Big Bay de Noc School District would be accepting bids for some of their used wood shop equipment: band saws, a lathe, a scroll saw, you know, real woodworking machines. I went to the school early one morning to have a look at the equipment. I didn’t have high hopes of being a winning bidder but I wanted to look and bid as much as I thought the items I was interested in were worth to me.

A member of the school staff brought me to where these machines were kept. The room was crowded with various shop items along with other assorted things. It appeared that it was a storage room.

The machines that were up for bids were well shopworn, which was to be expected; they had been used in a wood shop, after all. There were other woodworking machines in the room as well, and when I asked why all of the shop tools were here in the storage room, I was told that this used to be the wood shop but due to budget cuts the school no longer had a wood shop program and the room was now used for storage.

I know very well that almost all school districts have been faced with budget problems, but since I don’t have children in the Big Bay de Noc district, I was unaware of the things that had been cut out of the curriculum. I couldn’t help but think of how unfortunate it was that wood shop was no longer available to these students.

When I was in school, there were usually two types of students who took shop classes. There were those who took the class because they thought it would be easy and free of homework, and there were those who were genuinely interested in the class being offered.

I, myself, fell somewhere between the two. I didn’t like homework but I did like working with wood.

These classes did serve a real purpose, whatever the reason for the student’s participation. Shop classes introduced the students to real-world concepts and principles in the area mechanical aptitude.

I don’t think that you would be surprised to learn that many of the students in a shop class weren’t what you might call “book smart,” but many times it was these students who were the best at doing things with their hands. They could build things or repair things that were broken.
Many of the shop classes required a great deal of common sense, and for the most part common sense is something that could not be taught.

On occasion a “book smart” student would find themselves in a shop class, and it was obvious that they were like a fish out of water in this environment. If anyone was going to get hurt by a machine, it was someone who spent too much time reading about said machine instead of spending time understanding the machine.

I do understand the need to educate young people in a way that will allow them to compete in today’s world. Almost every career out there these days depends on some form of advanced technology; we would be foolish to ignore that fact.

We would also be foolish to ignore the fact that we need people who actually know how to build and repair things. Being able to design a house on a computer is a marvel, but you can’t live in it until someone builds it. The virtual world is a fun place to play, but we still need to live in the real world.

Thinking about those old-timers in the millwork shop, I now know part of the reason they were happy. The reason was that I, a young adult, was taking an interest in the very thing that they enjoyed doing. The torch was being passed, in a sense.

Someday I plan to give my woodworking tools to a young person who shows a real interest in the craft. I hope that there will still be an interest when that day comes.