Sawdust on the Floor

Not every woodworker has a shop like Norm Abrams, or builds a project totally using hand tools like Roy Underhill.  Most of us have modest shops and use a combination of power tools and hand tools in our woodworking endeavors.  The size and complexity of our projects run the entire gambit from small boxes to complete kitchen rebuilds. But even with all of these differences, I truly believe that there are some truths that all of us who enjoy woodworking hold tightly . And there are some things that no real woodworker never wants to see, such as:

My wife I visited a classic furniture store looking for night stands for our bedroom.  While my wife was talking to the salesperson, I began looking closely at one item that had caught our eye. I had overheard the salesperson tell my wife that the piece was first quality and made of all hardwood.  So taking a closer look at the piece I found two things that woodworker never wants to see.  First the piece was made of particle board with a laminate over it.  My first clue was the weight of the piece.  I could barely pick it up.  Real wood, oak in this case, wouldn’t ever weight that much. The second item I found was what really got me going.  Looking at the drawers of the night stand, I found what looked like dovetail joinery.  I thought this was really odd, why go to the trouble of making dovetails in a particle/laminate piece of furniture.  A real close look at the piece showed that the dovetails were imprinted into the laminate of the drawer.  They were not real, just a poor copy.  We left the store and the ” Real Wood Piece”  sitting there.

Or

I recently picked up a woodworking magazine that featured a really nice looking Craftsman style display as one of the projects covered in that edition.  The case was made of absolutely beautiful quarter sawn oak, the design and scaling of the piece were really great.  The workmanship that I could see in the pictures that accompanied the article was superb.  The problem with the project was in the through tenons that attached the top and bottom shelves of the case.  They weren’t.  Reading the article and looking at the cutting list, I found that the tenons were false, they were simply glued to the case of the piece.

Cutting real through mortises and tenons takes practice and the right tools, but why go to the expense of using quarter sawn oak, to fabricate the piece and then apply “false through tenons.  One of the joys of building true craftsman pieces is cutting the mortise and tenon joinery.  False or applied through tenons is another one of those things that a real woodworker doesn’t want to see.

Are these real issues or just my opinion?  That’s a question you will have to decide. For now they are strictly my humble opinion, but I think that these two items should fall under the “truth in advertising rules.  Painted dovetails and applied through tenons  are things that a real woodworker shouldn’t ever see.

Related posts:

1. Your Workshop – Things every Shop Needs
2. What makes a good woodworker?
3. The Forgotten Woodworker