Sustainability and Survivability

We are members of the Sustainable Furniture Council. We believe in using resources wisely. We recycle our wood waste and our water bottles. We are always looking for materials that are less harmful for the environment (and for us). Tomorrrow, for example, a salesman I know is coming by to talk about water borne finishes with me. We haven't converted to them yet because the industry has not been able to produce a finish with the same aesthetic and durability qualities as lacquer. Water borne finishes also have solvents in their formula. I will be interested to see what they say and what the product looks like and what it is made of. We will not compromise our quality. And the lacquer that we use meets the rigorous European standards for HAPS and is considered a low VOC product. Acetone is not considered a VOC, by the way, which doesn't mean you can freely breath it. When a lady is getting her nails done and the nail lady is not wearing a respirator, you do wonder what is happening to her lungs. But perhaps you understand why acetone was excluded from the VOC list.

I have contended for the longest time that the most environmentally friendly thing you can do in purchasing furniture is to find a local or US maker (assuming that you are the consumer and are also in the US) and buy a product that is built to last generations. In the same logic that recycling is good, but it still uses lots of energy - while re-using is better as it doesn't have to convert matter to another form and therefore uses minimal energy, buying furniture built locally to last generations is much better than buying "Green" furniture shipped across the ocean and built to last ten years. The latter will then have to take up landfill space or be burned. The former has a small carbon footprint.

We try to build things that last. That means basically doing two things: Firstly, choosing materials of a high quality, such as solid wood, kiln dried to the proper level of moisture. Secondly, it means paying close attention to joinery. A good joint should not need a great deal of glue to successfully bond. Staples and screws will always fail before a good glue joint will. I have looked at a great deal of antique furniture that needs to be repaired. You learn a lot by examining these joints. Chairs built from turned parts with dowel joints almost always fail because the maker didn't understand wood shrinkage and the joint had to rely on the glue. Nakashima (http://www.nakashimawoodworker.com/) was one woodworker who knew how to fit the joint and then shrink the wood before joinery so that the wood would expand to lock the joint together. A good dovetail joint almost needs no glue to be solid. Same with a mortise and tenon. But I have seen countless joints come to me after desperate repairs with screws, dowels, etc. in a last ditch attempt to save a chair or some such thing. Crafted quality will last and takes up no landfill space.

We just had a potential customer switch to a product made in Asia, rather than buy custom made from us. The reason was money. The imported product is of vague provenance and of non described materials. In a photograph, the import looks great. In reality, when it arrives, how will it look? When will the day come that quality and the environment play equally weighted roles?

tuning your scraper

I wrote recently about a cabinet scraper. Its a tool that is so useful on a daily basis and yet many a contemporary cabinet maker doesn't know how to use one, let along how to sharpen one. I hope that the following is not too much information for those who are never going to make furniture. It is my hope to give you a sense of what you must do to keep your tools "tuned" in the shop. Sharpening tools is a necessary part of the making of cabinets and furniture. It is also of course a viable metaphor for what we all have to do in our lives. It takes "away" from the making of the "thing" but without keeping our tools sharp and ourselves, we would struggle and fail to accomplish our goals. So here is a basic primer on sharpening a cabinet scraper.

The sharpening is accomplished on a maintenance basis using a hardened piece of steel attached to a handle. Think of a screwdriver without the "business end" still intact and that's the idea. They make burnishing tools that are for this purpose too, but the French craftsman I trained with had just a modified screw driver handle and shank. You have to be able to hold the tool while exerting some force on the edge of the scraper and also the steel has to be at least as hard as the steel in the scraper. There are two essential motions that one performs. This is assuming by the way, that the scraper has already received an initial dressing with a file followed by a sharpening stone. The first movement is to go across the scraper like one would do with a barbers blade on a stropping strap. Back and forth across the flat scraper in the same plane as the flat orientation. It helps to be doing this on the surface table of a machine. The goal is to create a little burr that "grows" outward ever so slightly but in line with the scraper. This motion can be repeated many times, as the more the metal is moved here the better the final result will be (within reason). The second motion is a one shot deal that occurs for all four edges that will cut. Two per long edge, one on each side. The burnisher is held at almost a right 90 degree angle to the scraper , but tilted ever so slightly toward the flat, at about a 80-85 degree angle. The scraper has to be held flat on a preferably metal bench part of a machine such as a jointer, with about 1/4" of the tool protruding away from the edge of the machine. You must have a very firm grip on the scraper pressing down and on the burnishing tool pressing against the scraper. You get one shot at this and there is no going back unless you want to start over. Hold the burnisher low so that you don't cut your hand against the edge of the tool! Start as close to the far corner as possible and pull towards yourself while pressing against the edge at a constant 83 degree angle (approx!) and that is it. Repeat 3 more times on each other edge. You will get a burr now pointing up that you can feel with your finger. When you slightly bend the scraper with your thumbs in the center while holding the outside edges and press along a piece of wood you should get very thin shavings of wood. If you are producing dust, it is not sharpened properly or you are not holding the scraper properly. If you are trying to follow along and do an actual sharpening, good luck and I hope I gave you enough information! I'll be happy to answer questions and welcome your feedback.

phantom pain

In response to a friend's question about a note that I had lost a part of my finger in an accident, I wrote: I lost the tip 8 years ago in a wood machinery accident. It was a jointer and I lost the finger down to the first knuckle but luckily in this case (luck is relative), not so far that I couldn't still fully bend the finger. I experienced excruciating electric shocking like pain that occurred at random moments and a persistent throbbing pain that was made better by elevating my finger so that (because this was the middle finger) everyone thought who didn't know me that I was "giving them the finger" (I wish I had the finger fully to give). The pain lasted for months and months until I realized one day about five or six months after the accident that the pain was no longer from the "source" but imprinted in my brain. Then with the help of a friend who is a doctor interested in alternative medicine, he guided me while I hypnotized myself and accessed that part of my brain circuitry that was causing the pain. I visualized that area of my brain like it was an architectural plan, and I was fixed in finding the "control room" and found it with massive amounts of electrical gear and "breaker" switches inside.  I felt myself entering that room and I walked up to the correct breaker and threw the switch into the "off" position. The pain disappeared and has never come back.

One of the stamps of approval that many end users of furniture are looking for today is "FSC certified" wood. From their website: 

"In many forests around the world, logging still contributes to habitat destruction, water pollution, displacement of indigenous peoples. . .Many consumers of wood and paper. . . believe that the link between logging and these negative impacts can be broken, and that forests can be managed and protected at the same time. Forest Stewardship Council certification is one way to improve the practice of forestry."

I have worked in Ohio with a local Amish lumber yard that buys all of its wood in the region to find a way of certifying their product. They recently (after much prodding) were happy to report to me that they have been certified as an "Appalachian Hardwood Lumber Producer" and produces lumber from a 344-county territory that is a certified "Sustainable Hardwood Forest" as defined by the AHMI (Appalachian Hardwood Manufacturers, Inc.) and based on research data from the United States Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis "that shows net annual hardwood growth rates have exceeded annual hardwood harvest levels in the AHMI territory over the past 50 years."

I am pleased to have been at least one purchaser of their product that nudged them in this direction and also pleased to reassure the customer that this is one additional area we are dealing with in our efforts to be sustainable.

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There is a new magazine in North East Ohio. They "discovered" that there is a furniture maker producing a national product here in their backyard.