Last week I encountered two jackasses arguing on the internet about whether a handplane should be set down on its sole or its side. Normally I scroll past this inutile chum, but then I realized that both of the woodworkers who were slap-fighting like pudgy infants should 100 percent know better.
Honestly, this handplane-side-vs-sole shit is on the intellectual level of “My dad can beat up your dad.” So when experienced woodworkers engage in it, I assume only one thing: They just want some attention.
You might, however, be asking yourself this: If not the position of the handplane’s sole, then what should we argue about? What are the “great questions” of our craft?
For me, there is only one important question.
It was posed to me by Steve Shanesy, my former boss at Popular Woodworking Magazine. For most of our working relationship, Steve worked on the high-level strategy, while my job was to meet our deadlines so we weren’t punished for being late to press.
Every week, Steve and I got together to discuss two things: How do we survive the production of the current issue of the magazine? And how do we survive for another 100 years?
Steve’s goal was to create a path for people who were not woodworkers (and who had never even thought about woodworking) to become woodworkers. This path had two parts. I was assigned to create the easy part:
1. Easy: A free 93-page manual for getting started in the craft. The manual still exists; you can download it here. The magazine’s staff worked for months on this project, trying to set up a home woodworker with tools from the home center that would get them started on the right foot. We also began publishing a feature in every issue called “I Can Do That” that had nicely designed projects built with home center lumber, home center tools and our free manual.
2. Hard: Steve’s job was to write an essay that would persuade non-woodworkers to pick up the tools. The essay would be distributed to non-woodworking audiences, such as people who were about to retire. So, for a long time, Steve and I pondered *the* question. Here it is:
What words and photos will plant the idea in a person’s mind that they should become a woodworker?
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