Earlywood: How to Start a Woodworking Myth
Publisher’s note: Good morning and welcome to Earlywood, a free weekly excerpt from one of the thousands of pieces I’ve written since 1996. Sometimes, it’s from a magazine article. Or a book. Or (in this case) a blog post published in 2016. Each entry has been updated or annotated with some modern context or point of view. Enjoy!
There are so many old wives’ tales in our craft that you could write an entire book that lists and debunks them. Students constantly bombard me with them, and it makes me wonder: How the <redacted> do these begin?
After a slip of the tongue the other day, I think I have a good idea.
About 20 years ago, I was assembling a Roman workbench and had a couple woodworking friends over as we drove in the 3" tenons into the benchtop and wedged them in place. The wedges were massive slips of oak that I’d cut earlier in the day.
The weird thing about my wedges was that they each had a thin layer of cork affixed to one edge.
“What’s the cork for?” one guy asked.
“Because the top is so wet and these tenons are so big, the springy cork will allow for some wood movement without the wedges splitting the benchtop,” I replied.
I was, of course, joking. The cork was there because it had been stuck to the piece of scrap I’d grabbed to make the wedges. But the response from the other woodworkers was heads nodding.
Oh crap, I thought. So I quickly admitted that I was joking. The information was false. But my bull crap had sounded good, and that was the problem.
Lots of times, students ask me “why” I am doing a certain operation. If I know the answer I tell them. But if I don’t know, I am quick to say: “I don’t know.” But I know a lot of people who won’t say “I don’t know,” and so they’ll generate a logical but false response. Here’s an example that I’ve heard first-hand many times:
Question: Why do you finish both sides of a tabletop?
Answer: To equalize the moisture exchange on both faces of the board to prevent the board from warping.
The answer sounds reasonable, but it’s completely the opposite of fact. And so the information is absorbed by the student and passed on. And because the information sounds logical, it’s almost impossible to stamp out the falsehood, especially once it’s written down.
So if you know nothing, say nothing.
Correcting the Record
So, what do you do when you read misinformation or disinformation about the craft? The urge is to correct it, of course.1 But if you did that, it would become a full-time job for you. Some days, I think there are more wrongs that not-wrongs out there.
So all I can do is shovel the crap out of my own shop. If I hear it in our walls, I’ll correct it, gently but firmly. And if I have to get out a book to help prove my point, I will.
And if an apprentice repeats some bullshit from somewhere else, we’re going to go through a full explanation.
I know you’re wondering: Who decides what is BS and what is not?
And that’s where my training as a journalist comes into play. Recently, Kale mentioned something about the benefits of sanding up to very high grits (WAY past #220 and #340) on raw wood.
So we talked about abrasives and a full explanation of what happens to the wood at very fine grits (both good and bad). This is not my opinion. It’s from literature and experience.
And if we have to go to the bench for a demonstration, I will prove it.
But again, I am always the first to say I have no idea when I have no idea (which is almost every day).
And this is why I (Megan) argue with the people on our Facebook page who comment that chairs without stretchers will fall apart. The historical record proves them wrong…but I’ll never win.
I find the problem is that sometimes it's hard to tell where my knowledge ends and the bullshit begins. I teach math for a living, which is one area where you actually CAN generate answers through some logical reasoning even if you don't know the answer as the question is being asked. So I've gotten used to that mechanism kicking in when I interact with people, even when the topic is further from my wheelhouse.
Although, I've found that in my middle years, I've gotten much better at following up those kinds of answers with "I actually don't have any idea if that's true. But it sounds pretty good, right?"
Thank you ! It would be interesting for me to have a look on a short list of debunked myths, as I learned today that there's no need to finish the both sides of a tabletop for example. I read everywhere that otherwise wood will warp indeed. Most of the time, my answer to myself is for sure "I don't know"...