06-26-2022, 06:41 PM
(06-26-2022, 10:28 AM)CStan Wrote: [ -> ]Until Warren starts posting videos, the pikers on YouTube are all we have for occasional entertainment. Shall I hold my breath?
Allow me to enlighten you, Charles. I’ve known Warren for many years and he has informally taught many of us and I feel quite privileged to have worked with him, learned from him, and call him friend.
Long before I met Warren, while exhibiting hand made furniture on the reproduction furniture circuit, I got to rub elbows with some of the industry’s best. I invited them to my booth, where I was demoing 18th hand work, thinking all those repro guys would get a kick out of repro tools*. Long story short, all those builders advertised hand made furniture, and many or most made gorgeous pieces, with beautiful carvings and hand made features. But those builders were not hand tool people. Few could operate a hand saw. Chuck Bender was there that day and was an obvious stand out among them.
I later learned the best parts of the best pieces were farmed out to a hand tool woodworker living in the Lancaster Pa area. Guess who that was? Some of the best builders were hiring Warren to do the tricky parts.
Warren’s work and influence may not be obvious. Blame me for that. When I get a chance, I’ll try to get an invite and I’ll shoot some video. Warren’s hand skills are the real deal. He’s an outstanding carver, and spring pole turner, and he’s got the muscle memory and dexterity of a master with a lifetime of experience.
There used to be hand plane competitions. I think they put the planes on an inclined board and they’d measure how far they would travel on their own, taking super thin shavings. Warren won every year with an old Stanley #4. He out sharpened the competition.
Like Chuck Bender, Warren also has an artistic eye, able to dissect curves, patterns, and proportions. He’s seen and owns a good deal of 18th century furniture. They call that a “trained eye” in the industry. For me, it’s a game changer. We don’t really talk enough about that subject because most woodworkers I know hate the art history stuff. But it’s so important. Combine that with even hand tool competency, and I think you’ve got something. Not easy to make a YouTube video about that. I’ve tried writing about that a couple times.
*the tools I brought to the designer craftsman show that year (1999, 2000?) included repros of the Kenyon saws which I built and tested for years before sharing the designs with Mike Wenzloff (who made prettier and better versions than I ever did).
One of the things we did that day was try to saw the thinnest shaving off the end of a board without breaking it. This was my brother’s trick, who was also a phenomenal boat builder and woodworker (Google Cherubini yachts to see his work). That trick was the start of the hand tool Olympics. I enlisted Mike Siemsen at the first Woodworking In America to try it, we got Rob Lee to join in. That was really all my brother teaching that if you saw a board to length and get it wrong, it can be very difficult to make a small change with a hand saw. Takes skill and muscle memory.
Sorry this was so long, but hopefully stories long overdue telling.