Warping Wood: three lessons in how to change from The New Yankee Workshop.
Photo by
on
The New Yankee Workshop may not sound like a go-to source for inspiration into changing your life, but it is where I found mine over 20 years ago. Master carpenter Norm Abram’s techniques for bending wood unwittingly provided me real-life analogies onhow to correct my human deficiencies– something I’d seen Plato refer to as straightening the “warped wood”.
Dating as far back to the 17th Century, carpenters employed three specialized methods to bend or shape wood. During the winter of 1997, Norm met up with friend and master chair builder Mike Dunbar who detailed a process to rapidly changing wood’s shape without breaking it. I refer to it as the “lobster cooker”.
Lobster cooker: Mike’s technique fell under the category of steaming. An old propane lobster cooker (turkey fryer for you Midwesterners) supplied heat beneath a new, metal gas can filled with water. Next, the can was connected via a series of pipes and air-tight fittings to a long tube capable of holding the wood. By capping both ends of the cylinder, Mike created a “wood sauna.” Strips of wood were inserted into the cylinder and sealed. Once the steam sufficiently softened the wood, Mike had about forty-five seconds to reshape it into a new form before it rehardened. Finally, he secured it in place to keep it from returning to its old shape.
The year I graduated high school in 1994, Norm was tackling a rocking chair where he employed a second technique called bent lamination.
Laminating: Woodworkers sometimes avoid simply cutting out a new, curved shape from existing wood because it creates points of weakness called short grain. Other times, the size of the wood is too large to steam and bend. This is when lamination provides a strong alternative by gluing thinly sliced, flexible layers together– like a sandwich– into a single straight unit. Placing the laminated boards against a curved jig, designed with the end shape in mind, Norm applied pressure with clamps until the boards moved into shape. They were then given time to dry.
Years later, This Old House asked Norm to share his “Best Tricks of the Trade” where he fielded a question from Walter down in Topeka. Walter wanted to know how to turn a straight piece of wood into an arch and needed to know how to bend it and what wood to avoid. This gave Norm a chance to explain the third technique, kerfing.
Kerfing: Kerfing is a technique of cutting notches into wood at exactly the right spacing and depth which provide room to allow it to bend into place. This specialized process requires a craftsman with a good knowledge of geometry and one who knows exactly the subsequent shape they hope to achieve. Cutting notches deep-and-close together will make your board extremely flexible, but also likely to snap in two. Cut your notches too shallow-and-far-apart and your board won’t bend. If you use boards with knots or defects it is likely to create weak-points where the wood is liable to break.
Illustration by Harry Bates
A few hundred years earlier, an itinerant son of a carpenter spoke to the masses in the Sermon on the Mount saying, “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.” Fellow craftsman listening in the audience that day understood exactly the message Jesus was trying to convey: the softening of wood. The Semitic root of the Aramaic word for meek means the softening of that which is rigid.
At the time of this writing in June of 2020, we are all being provided an opportunity to correct warps in ourselves and our society which have been ignored for too long. Protests and riots provide the heat for our lobster boil giving us a short window of opportunity to change. As with the wood, we will not stay pliable for long. We must maintain pressure on ourselves and our politicians to reshape our thoughts, laws, institutions and policies in ways that benefit all humanity. Then, we must tack those changes in place, staying vigilant so they do not return to the old ways.
With each uncomfortable conversation, every eye-opening book, every racist symbol removed from our minds & towns we make a kerfing cut whereby lasting change becomes possible. As coalitions of humanity unite and glue themselves together with a common purpose to eradicate racism and clamp ourselves together in a new shape we will achieve a strength never possible from wood cut from a single piece.
