There’s some feedback that I am unable to give to students – simply because I don’t want to look like an assh--… uh… let’s just say I don’t want to look like a giant, poorly chopped-out and stringy mortise. Dripping with sap.
But I’ve resolved to talk about it here today because I’ve just come off a stretch of teaching for 23 of the last 44 days. I’ve seen some shit.
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When a student asks to borrow one of my personal tools, I smile and hand it to them. I also say a little prayer for the poor metal bastard for what’s about to go down.
Students, especially (but not always) beginners, are impossibly abusive when handling the tools of others. I wonder if it’s the same mentality people have when they rent a car.
I cannot say is better than the late P.J. O’Rourke did in 1979:
Even more important than being drunk, however, is having the right car. You have to get a car that handles really well. This is extremely important, and there’s a lot of debate on this subject — about what kind of car handles best. Some say a front-engined car; some say a rear-engined car. I say a rented car. Nothing handles better than a rented car. You can go faster, turn corners sharper, and put the transmission into reverse while going forward at a higher rate of speed in a rented car than in any other kind. You can also park without looking, and can use the trunk as an ice chest. Another thing about a rented car is that it’s an all-terrain vehicle. Mud, snow, water, woods—you can take a rented car anywhere. True, you can’t always get it back—but that’s not your problem, is it?
I once watched a student use Megan Fitzpatrick’s poor Lie-Nielsen No. 3 with the same care as a sledgehammer. This is a plane that has been tuned to safely shave the ball hair off a proton, and it works best when you caress it like the mane of miniature pony.
The student dropped Megan’s plane on the bench from about 4" up – clonk. Every adjustment Megan had made to the tool was instantly lost. When the student picked it up again, the tools was clearly f-ed up. So the student adjusted the depth of cut, the lateral adjustment and – just for funsies – the lever-cap screw.
Then the grunting began as the student plowed into the board. “Who. Does. Number 3. Work for?”
I honestly wanted to take the poor plane away from the student and hand them a cork block and a piece of sandpaper.1
But you can’t do this when you are teaching. These people have paid you – a lot. And you are supposed to help them across the finish line for the class, even if they bent the sawplate of your dovetail saw, wiped hamburger grease on the striking face of your nail hammer and chipped your scorp’s blade by repeatedly trying to beaver through a metal screw.2
So I’m saying it here: Tools are like musical instruments. To get them to work properly, you have to know what all the knobs do. And you have to know that everything – even a freaking timpani – requires the right amount of force at the right time and in the right place.
When something goes wrong with a borrowed tool – and it will – don’t adjust someone else’s tool unless you have had intimate congress with a dozen just like it.3
Yes, you have to muck up some tools and butcher some wood to learn this stuff. But… how do I explain this to others?
Last week at the Florida School of Woodwork I had 11 students for a chair class; all of them had to use my rounding plane to make their long sticks – 84 sticks in all. The rounding plane has a wooden body and a spokeshave blade. And if you knock the blade out by a nose hair, the tool will start spewing out gnawed-off firewood instead of perfect cylinders.
I was – honestly – a bit terrified by the prospect of 11 different students driving their sticks through my rounding plane. So I made this plea:
“This is the only one of these I have,” I said. “If we mess it up, we’re screwed this week. And – even more important – this tool is an important part of my livelihood. If it gets messed up, I’m out of commission for a while. And so I’m asking you to take the following steps when using it….”
My pathetic speech helped. Yes, I had to review the steps with each student, but the rounding plane survived the process and is still in working order.
This particular teaching process reminded me of instructing my kids on how to pet a dog or a cat. I just sometimes wish that my tools could lash out when they were mistreated – as did a stray cat to the kid in my old neighborhood who almost lost an eye after flicking homemade napalm at it.4
But that’s too dark. Right?
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