My web site, started in 1995, is what allowed me to quit my day job.” As one of the first woodworkers online, he got most of the links by default, and that continues to today. “If you Google Greene and Greene or Arts and Crafts furniture, I am always in the top ten.” (I tried it with “Greene and Greene furniture” and sure enough, Darrell’s web site, www.furnituremaker.com, came up first on the list.) By 1998, he had enough orders backed up that it made sense to make the move to his own shop full time.

But his woodworking career started long before that. His first job out of high school was making laminated beams at a factory in Sumner, Washington. Meanwhile, he was using his spare time to make plant holders and medicine cabinets and selling them at Pike Place Market in Seattle. That was the early 70’s, the same time the very first Starbucks opened at that very same market. The original Starbucks store is still there, open for business, but Darrell has moved south to Auburn.

At 53, Peart and his wife boast three children and three grandchildren. A Washington state native, he was born in Wenatchie, and has lived in the Puget Sound area since 1955. For you Right Coasters, that’s the area that encompasses Seattle and Tacoma.

During his career, he worked at a variety of cabinet and millwork shops, changing jobs in order to learn new tools or techniques. He spent almost thirty years in the woodworking trades before going out on his own. Along the way, he made upholstery frames, kitchen cabinets, conference tables, and custom office furniture, milled lumber, and even ran a CNC machine, but he always maintained a home business as well.

Why woodworking? “I enjoy it. Just the act of woodworking is creative, because it is problem solving. It makes life exciting, once the panic is gone. The catch is that custom woodworking often does not pay well, because the solution costs so much in time and research, but I love it.”

One of Darrell’s early influences was James Krenov, another local who went to West Seattle high school. He’s also a big fan of Chippendale, from whom he got much of his approach to proportioning. “If you strip away the Gothic ornamentation, his proportioning is excellent. That boldness and masculinity shows up in some of my designs, such as my Thorsen Table.”

His strongest influence, and the one he is most recognized for, came when he was at Abella Woodworking at Seattle. While working on a job that was adorned with glued-on tenons, he made the comment to a co-worker that this phony workmanship was what first spawned the arts and crafts movement. The man brought in a book about the Gamble House, and Peart’s fate was sealed. He fell in love with Greene and Greene.

“Greene and Greene is Gustav Stickley meets Japan,” Darrell explained. “The Greene brothers brought a Japanese influence to the popular Arts and Crafts movement, adding elements like cloud lifts, brackets, and the “tsuba” shape, both as an inlay and as the overall shape for table tops.” A tsuba is the ovoid guard between the blade and handle on a Japanese sword.

The Greene brothers, in turn, were strongly influenced by another pair of brothers, Peter and John Hall. “The Halls were incredibly talented Swedish woodworkers trained in the Sloyd method, whose philosophy is very close to the Arts and Crafts views.” Sloyd, which means dexterity or manual, artistic skill, developed in Sweden in the 19th century. It encourages making useful items, and starting each job with a mechanical drawing.

“Greene and Greene designs were nice, but in some of their earlier work, the execution was poor. The Hall bothers brought in a high level of traditional woodworking skills. That allowed Charles Greene’s imagination to run wild, since the Hall brothers could build anything, and build it well. If the Halls had not come along, Greene and Greene might have ended up far less important than they are.”

Their influence is strong in Peart’s shop, where he makes tables, chairs, desks, beds, and sideboards in his own interpretation of Greene and Greene styles. His custom work, done mostly in khaya (African Mahogany) and ebony, runs from about a thousand dollars for a simple chair to ten or fifteen thousand for a bed or sideboard. The pieces are dyed, then finished with oil based coatings. Currently, there is a one year backlog on woodworking jobs.

Though he sees himself as essentially a hardcore woodworker, Darrell does teach classes both at his Auburn shop, and at American Sycamore Woodworking Retreat in Indiana. “The classes are fun, and profitable, and teaching allows me the freedom to accept only the commissions I want to take.”

His hands-on weekend classes are limited for four people at a time. Students make a corner of a table and leg incorporating all the traditional Greene and Greene elements, including cloud lifts, buttons, exposed spline, brackets, and leg indent details. Those in longer classes use these skills to make complete pieces of furniture. His teaching style runs more to one-on-one interaction than flashy presentation. “The best thing is when I walk around and mingle with those doing the work.”

This woodworker, designer, and teacher is soon to be an author as well. He is currently working on a book about Greene and Greene furniture from the perspective of a woodworker. It will be divided into three parts. The first part is a rehash of history, with a bit more focus on the Halls. The middle section will show how to do Greene and Greene details. The object, he says, is not for readers to reproduce Greene and Greene furniture, but to allow them to take this knowledge and apply it to their designs. Not surprisingly, the third section will show how other contemporary woodworkers have used these influences, thus encouraging woodworkers to grow on their own.

Working on the book helped open doors, allowing him to actually put his hands on things that he’d never have been able to see and touch. He got in to the Thorsen House, the Robinson House, and Greene Gables, where the Robin Williams movie “Bicentennial Man” was filmed. Peart has also written for magazines, including two articles for Today’s Woodworker, back when it was a separate publication.

What’s ahead? “I’d like to get more into design. That’s what I really enjoy. Studying Greene and Greene in minute detail for the book has given me ideas for things I want to try. That’s made me appreciate the genius of Charles Greene, but also makes me wonder where all the ideas came from. It just about gives you an inferiority complex.”

An inferiority complex? I don’t think so; not with the caliber of work that Darrell Peart produces.

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One of those tasks was hanging doors, which proved to be more frustrating than Siegmund thought it should. There had to be a way, he thought, that even an unskilled helper could do a perfect job in hanging a door right the first time. “Especially when we go to big doors, 8 foot doors at 2-1/4, 250 pounds, you don’t want to do them twice,” he said.

With that in mind, Siegmund spent eight years fooling around and trying to create the jig that he knew could exist. “When I started out, I was going to do something like a miter saw stand for cutting boards very precise. Then, when I see the stand, I thought I might as well put something under it that can do hinged doors with it.” He was looking for a mechanism — “I just wanted something simple,” he said — “and all of a sudden the idea came that I don’t need the miter saw. I just need the door itself as a rail. If I attach the jamb to the door, then I can make [the mortise for] each hinge.”

This self-aligning combination unit accurately mortises the door and jamb for the hinges, drills the holes for the lockset and rabbets the jambs for the header. It works with any router, although a larger router is necessary if you’re going to use larger hinges.

“You do the jamb and the door at the same time” and it doesn’t really matter where you put your hinge, Siegmund said: “those two always fit. An eighth of an inch one way or the other makes no difference, but that particular hinge always fits.”

After clamping your door, you place his jig onto it, attach a frame, then slide a hinge into position where you want it. “If the door is two feet long or 10 feet long, it makes no difference,” Siegmund said. “You slide it onto where you want to stop and put the hinge, and that’s where the hinge fits.”

He went through the patent process for his Sieg Jig, as he calls it, and has started marketing it through such venues as his web site, which includes a video demonstrating the SiegJig in action. At the moment, he’s trying to recoup his costs from patenting and development, and it’s his hope that the Jig will sell well enough that he can hand over his carpentry business to his assistants and focus on the SiegJig full-time. “I have some guys in the shop right now who could take over,” he said.

“Basically, I’m saying [the Jig] is for upscale finish carpenters or specialized millwork shops: guys that hang their own doors,” he said. With the Jig, though, they could hand off the task to their assistants, it is that simple.

Siegmund is currently making all of the Jigs himself, in his own shop. “I got a milling machine, and I got a lathe, and then I go to town,” he said. “I do maybe, say, thirty or forty at one crack right now until, you know, the production increases.”

His materials are aluminum castings, a steel spindle, and phenolic plastic for the routing templates. “The nice thing about it is, if you hit it with a router bit, you don’t damage the router bit,” he explained about his choice of phenolic. “You might dent the plastic, but the conventional way, if you had the metal, you lose your bit and your metal base.”

Cost considerations are what he hopes will appeal to those who might be in the market for a SiegJig, which currently retails for $670. But if you’re installing doors yourself, he said, “As soon as you go out of standard, then the whole cost picture changes.” If you’re going to install a specialty door, “you might as well hang it yourself because you have enough money in it.”

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An avid student of her small-town Norwegian roots, Beatrice (now living in Eden Prairie, Minnesota) was fascinated to read an article about an instrument vital to rural churches in the 1800s, yet practically unknown today.

Here’s a little history. Norway fell under Swedish domination in the 19th Century. The state church for both countries decreed that any instrument used for dancing was not appropriate for church services. Since that left out the violin, and many small rural churches couldn’t afford an organ, the door was open for the creation of the psalmodikon. Played with a bow, the instrument was essentially a long box with a single string, inexpensive to build, and easy to learn to play. Its slow, melodic quality worked well with the hymns of the period, and it was quickly adopted in both Sweden and Norway to lead singing in the churches and schools. Immigrants to America who were facing the same financial limitation setting up their churches also turned to the psalmodikon. As immigrant communities prospered, church organs supplanted the instrument. It suffered a similar fate in the old countries and was virtually forgotten on both sides of the Atlantic.

Then Beatrice read the 1991 article that described how Harlis Anderson had come across an old family psalmodikon in his attic and taught himself how to play. She contacted Harlis and, once she’d learned to play, her next challenge was finding a woodworker who could build one.

“Harlis’ instrument was from 1867,” Beatrice explained, “and was little more than a hollowed-out linden wood 2 x 4 with end pieces attached to hold the turning pegs.”

Beatrice wanted something nicer and researched the instruments in museum collections.

“Linden wood is not really ideal for an instrument. Traditionally in Sweden or Norway they use tall pine because it has a longer grain with better resonance. My research showed that the dimensions of the long hollow box were important and there was a range of sizes, but the fretboard has a crucial mathematical reasoning. Each note has to sound just like a piano key, and the scale has to be very precise & otherwise they couldn’t make standard music. The deeper the note, the farther apart they were, so the spacing is kind of graduated as it goes up and down. I found a cabinetmaker in Stillwater, Minnesota, who made two of them & I got one.”

Her first performance was at the 1992 Nordic Fest in Decorah, Iowa.

“People were fascinated, and I taught the psalmodikon’s history and showed how it sounded to hundreds of people at the Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum. I’m sure the first tune I played was a hymn and probably ‘Children of the Heavenly Father’ which goes back to the 1800s and is one of the greater hymns.”

Since that time, Beatrice has played in nine states and in both Norway and Sweden. She visited an international psalmodikon meeting in Sweden. In 1997, she helped to found the Nordic-American Psalmodikonforbundet, an organization that provides information on the instrument, and hosted a visit from its Scandinavian counterpart in 2000. Beatrice also edits the organization’s newsletter.

Appearing in traditional costume, her programs can focus on a performance or present a wider view of Norwegian immigrant culture in the Midwest. She also gives lessons on the instrument and produced a video/CD on playing.

Today, according to Beatrice, most woodworkers find sitka spruce from Alaska to be the best wood for the instrument. Over the years she has worked with several Twin Cities area woodworkers to make her psalmodikons, including: Floyd Foslien in Hudson, Wisconsin; Paul Knivsland in North St. Paul, Minnesota; and, perhaps a little farther out, Dick Holter in Cohasset, Minnesota.

“It’s an easy instrument to learn,” Beatrice concluded. “Each fret is marked with a number and music for the psalmodikon could consist of a list of numbers with words to the song printed above them.”

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The boys grew up in the suburbs of Munich, but spent time at their grandfather’s mountain hut in the Austrian Alps. Their background in woodworking goes back two generations. Their father was a woodcarver, and their grandfather was both a woodcarver and all-around craftsman working in wood, metal, stone, and paint – often in the service of church building. Initially, however, the brothers decided to follow a different career path.

“We always liked woodworking and thought it was a fun thing,.” Robert Meier recalled, “but we went into mechanical engineering in Munich.”

Then, around fifteen years ago, the Meier brothers decided it was time to pull up stakes and live in a foreign country. During their travels, they found issues with most places that kept them from settling down, until they arrived in California.

“When we came to San Francisco, we really liked it. It was much nicer than Bavaria and we settled down here in the Bay area.”

The change of climate and geography also inspired them to reconsider woodworking as a career and business. They brought a few hand tools and chisels from the old country, but had to buy all new power tools. Getting started wasn’t easy.

“This took a long time and it was a very hard road to make a living making very expensive furniture pieces. No one knew us, and no one wanted to show our work in their galleries. Slowly, but surely, we got our work into shows and began to win some competitions, and people began to see and like our work. A local newspaper wrote about us, then bigger newspapers wrote about us, and we slowly got more and more clients following our work. It helped that we were in the high-tech capital of the world, and we eventually gained a few wealthy clients who told their wealthy friends and it goes rolling along like a snowball.”

Grounded in Old World techniques, the brothers developed a furniture style that was anything but Old World.

“In the old country we grew up with antique furniture, and we never liked it.” Robert explained, “It was dark and heavy, and we wanted to do something very different.”

Robert finds it difficult to define the style or look they’ve developed, but thinks you can always spot a Meier Brothers piece. It incorporates some Shaker joining techniques, but it’s all pretty much their own invention. Some pieces incorporate metal elements – which is part of their family and professional background – and all are made from solid wood.

Overtime the brothers developed specialties in the business. Robert works in the main shop where the furniture is built, while Christian takes charge of sanding and finishing in a separate area. The brothers are busy and usually working one year in advance on their projects, but they’ve never considered hiring employees.

“We could use some,” Robert noted, “but we are so busy we’d never have time to keep them on schedule and look at their work. We are too picky about how our end product looks.”

Robert described their shop as a modest property in the upper hills, where they both live & Christian with his wife and daughter. They arrived with business visas, and, recently, Christian got his U.S. citizenship. Robert still has his green card, but plans to pursue citizenship as well.

The brothers are currently working on a new line that Robert described as “very modern” and it should soon be available for viewing on the their website.

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“He didn’t put all his eggs in one basket,” Mike recalled.”He was smart, and I’ll never forget that.”

It’s a lesson Mike has put into practice in his own woodworking businesses. Today he has three distinct product lines for three different markets. Using exotic and beautiful hardwoods he makes inlaid tape measures for the craft stores and galleries, humidors for tobacco and cigar shops, and finished bodies, necks, and fingerboards for a guitar manufacturer.

Originally from Indiana, Mike and his wife spent a few years in Peru working for the Peace Corp in the late 1960s. When they got back, Mike attended graduate school at the International Business School in Phoenix, Arizona, writing his thesis on the hardwood industry in Brazil. He soon landed a job managing a sawmill in Nicaragua for an American company.

“They wanted the tropical walnut that grows down there, Mike recalled, “but it turned out it was too soft and punky and wasn’t worth anything. When our son was born, we came back and I found a job in Baltimore with a hardwood lumber company.”

As he learned more about the hardwood industry, he also discovered some of the frustrations of dealing with a commodity product. When the housing industry was up, he could sell all the lumber he had & but the sawmills wanted to sell it themselves. And when the economy was down, the sawmills wanted him to sell their lumber, but nobody wanted to buy it.

That’s when he had his epiphany after talking to the sawmill/hotel owner in Pennsylvania. In 1971, he started a craft business on the side & still working with the lumber company. Having no background in woodworking, he hooked up with a friend who had machinery and started making small craft items. He learned production through trial and error.

“We moved from Baltimore to Brownsville, Maryland, in 1973. I got into the Harper’s Ferry Art Show, which is in my own backyard,” Mike recalled, “and there was a company there with all kinds of wood products and kitchen items made of poplar, oak, walnut and cherry & domestic stuff. And through the lumber company I had access to all these imported, colorful hardwoods. So I jazzed up my line with imported woods and a more contemporary, less folksy look. I sold stuff like crazy at art fairs, but there weren’t that many back then, and it was pretty lean pickings for the first few years.”

Working as a lumber broker got Mike through those early days, but by the late 1970s and early 1980s he phased out the lumber side and was able to do 20 to 30 retail shows a year& even had a couple of people working for him. As the number of craft shows grew, he attended scores each year, selling his lines of kitchenware and desk accessories.

“Then as one line peaked another would wane,” Mike recalled, “so I added jewelry boxes.”

In the mid 1990s he was doing a show in New York City, and several customers mentioned that his jewelry boxes looked like humidors and he should try making them. It was in the midst of the cigar craze and Mike visited an upscale tobacconist on Lexington Avenue. He expected it to be like a newsstand where they sold cigars, but he found everybody in a suit and mahogany display cases. The humidors for sale were from Switzerland & the cheapest one was $500.

“I was totally impressed that they could get so much money for them! When I got back to Maryland, I looked up a tobacco shop in Washington D.C. and met with the owner and told him what I was interested in doing. He told me about humidors and what to avoid. One of the most important things I learned was the difference between jewelry boxes and humidors. They are built completely different.”

With a moisture level of 70% inside, the humidor’s core structure has to be MDF or plywood. A solid wood lid would fight with solid wood sides and soon warp as it expanded and contracted. Mike applies a veneer or 1/16″ sawn veneer to the top and sides. The other difference is the seal.

“When you close a humidor it goes ‘poof’ like a door on a new car.” Mike explained, “I can’t tell you my trade secret, but it’s critical to making a good humidor, and some woodworkers miss that. If you make it too tight the lid sticks, and if you make it too loose it slams shut like an Asian import.”

The cigar craze ended as fast as it began. To take up the slack, Mike started making parts for a guitar manufacturer. There are only a few kinds of wood that can be used on most guitars, but the company Mike works with makes resophonic guitars which uses a special aluminum resonator for the sound. That meant Mike could use any exotic wood he wanted.

“It’s still a backyard business,” Mike explained, “but more than a craft shop. Right now I have three or four employees, and that’s about all I want. Everything I make is a high skill product that requires good people and good machinery. Quality is most important. So now I’m staying at home and not doing shows so I can pay attention to quality.”

To see more of Mike’s work visit his humidors web site.

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Jeff hand crafts each clock — including the gears and pendulum — using different woods and veneers that include oak, cherry, maple, mahogany, and walnut. A mechanical engineer during his day job, Jeff’s technical expertise, use of CAD systems, and experience making prototypes gives him the background to lay out and execute the complex workings of each clock. His woodworking skills do the rest.

Jeff grew up on the lower peninsula of Michigan. When his wife wanted to get away from the snow, the couple first moved to San Diego. He always had an interest in woodworking, but his concentration on clocks started with a magazine article.

“I read about a guy who’d done some clocks out of wood, and being the engineer that I am, it really struck a chord,” Jeff recalled. “I said to myself, I can do the engineering part of figuring out how to make a clock out of wood, and then I can make the clock with the woodworking tools that I had. As it turned out, it does take some different tools to make clocks.”

Copying the magazine’s detailed description of the clock, Jeff made his own version. When it didn’t work, he started over from scratch and applied his mechanical engineering background to, as he puts it, “reinventing the wheel.” Non-digital clocks today are made from metal & and have been for a long time. But the first clockworks were made from wood and some are still running. Jeff thinks wood is actually better than metal.

“Going back to my professional experience, I knew that, when designed right, plastic gears last longer than metal gears. Unless you overhaul it every five years, the oil in metal gears collects, gets gummy on the axels, and slows down the works. Wood has the same softness and resiliency as plastic. I honestly haven’t been running my clocks long enough to know, but because there really isn’t any oil, I believe they won’t have that problem. I am using a Danish oil finish and put a little bit of wax on the escapement (the thing that goes back and forth every second), but I really don’t use oil.”

Jeff admitted that, at the end of all the axles, he uses a 1/16″ metal pin that rides a nylon bushing. Unlike metal on metal, however, he contends that nylon on metal will never wear out.

“The design I have now is completely my own,” he explained. “Of course, I’ve now read quite a few clock design books and have gotten a lot of tips from them. But I have to throw 90% of them out the window, because they assume you are doing something from brass and steel. The general mechanics apply, but not the materials and manufacturing methods.”

Two years ago, Jeff and his wife made the move to their present home in Phoenix, Arizona. The move gave them the slower paced and less expensive lifestyle they wanted. And his current shop — now set up in the garage — gave him the space to start building production clocks.

To show the precision of his woodwork, Jeff leaves the sides of his clockwork open. Because woods like oak would split under stress as gears, Jeff uses Baltic birch plywood with different wood veneers for the face, dials, and gears. All the gears are cut one at a time, but to make them consistent, Jeff created his own CNC router.

“Using the parallel port on my computer, the router instructions go to a box I devised that controls three separate stepper motors on an X, Y and Z axis. I’ve got a RotoZip in it, and when I set it up and get it going, it takes about five minutes to cut a gear. It’s just wonderful to sit there and watch it. It’s actually pretty simple to build and only cost me maybe $600. It takes some knowledge, but somebody could put a kit together, for the average Joe to build it. I’m surprised I haven’t seen any articles about this in the woodworking magazines. The only thing comparable is the large ShopBot, which I think sells for $5,000.”

Jeff has high hopes that his clocks will catch on. So far business has been slow, but he remains patiently optimistic.

“I’ve made 20 clocks so far. Each clock takes about 60 hours, and the retail price is $3,600, but I haven’t sold any at that price. I have them in art galleries right now on consignment all over the country. One of the dealers is planning on buying one outright for his showroom. But it’s kind of my struggle, trying to find the high-end market. I want to do the clocks because they are unique & but the uniqueness coupled with a high price makes them difficult to sell. At galleries, I get looked down upon because they don’t consider it ‘true art’ like a painting or sculptures. When I go to furniture stores, they already have their expensive grandfather clocks, which are not the same thing. So I’m still trying to find the right market. And if all you want is a clock you can pick one up for $20.”

He’s thought about selling through online auctions, but he’s not sure he would reach the right clientele or how his galleries would react to competition. For the near future he’s thinking about designing a floor-model version & even though he realizes it would be even more expensive.

“Marketing is the brick wall that most people run into. You can get a lot of oh’s and ah’s, but you have to find the right person with the right amount of money in their pocket. Every product needs a niche and that can be a puzzler. I expect it will take a few years to fill the pipeline and get enough shown out there to have regular sales. Someday, I’d love to have enough business with one or two employees doing all the sanding, I don’t know when it will happen, but I’m hoping it doesn’t take me 80 years to make it.”

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Working in a nineteenth century mill overlooking Dorset Mill Pond in the Rhode Island countryside, Tom Davin and Mary Kesler — husband and wife partners — have spent almost three decades carving out a profitable niche, primarily in the wholesale crafts market.

Back in the mid 1970s — and with no previous experience — Tom studied cabinetmaking in the industrial design department at California State University in Northridge. Upon graduation he launched his woodworking business. When Mary got accepted at UC Davis, the couple moved to the farm belt town of Woodland, near Sacramento, California. Mary got “dragged into the business,” as Tom put it, because he needed help and couldn’t afford to hire anyone. While pursuing her degree in nutrition, Mary also took woodworking classes to augment her involvement in the business.

Tom had previously done some large pieces of furniture, but after the move, he began to reevaluate his business.

“I think the simplicity of a lot of Asian designs is beautiful and elegant.” Tom noted, “The same is true of a lot of different designs, but our breadboard always seems to ring true for me. Its simplicity is really nice to live with.”

“There really wasn’t an easy market like there was in the Los Angeles area for the bigger pieces. I started looking around at stores and saying that I could do this kind of work – like jewelry boxes & and even compete on the price. We started doing a lot of craft shows in the Bay area, did a couple of wholesale shows in LA, and the American Craft Council in San Francisco where the first few days of the show are wholesale. We had gallery owners and high-end department stores such as Nieman Marcus coming in and looking, and we realized there was this whole other world of small crafts.”

The couple decided on a mix of 75-80% wholesale and 20% retail & a proportion they’ve stuck to ever since. And as their business grew and they contemplated raising a family, they decided it was time for another move.

“We got to a point where half of our business was on the West Coast and half on the East Coast.” Tom noted, “We drove around [New England] and really liked it. We decided the quality of life we’d have on the East Coast was a pretty good bang for the buck. It was a good move!”

The couple found and rented space in an old textile mill. And around 1984, they bought the entire building. The business made money from the start, “because there was no alternative,” Tom recalled.

Over the years, original designs have evolved and new ones emerged. Tom explained the design process as knowing what you do well and then finding products that utilize that expertise.

“Most designs start with conversation. We ask what people liked and wanted and how we could make it better. Some of our best products have come from storeowners. They never suggest design or shape but say they really need letter openers, chopsticks, a sushi board, etc. and then we go back and try to create them. We go through the sketch process, and at some point I need to do some mock-ups, which could be real down and dirty with the band saw and glue gun. The hard part is to come up with a design that you can make efficiently and that still looks and feels right. It has to look like something you can’t do at home and or even want to try. You might come up with a beautiful design, but if it’s going to retail for $250, you’re only going to sell three of them.”

And some products just don’t work out over time.

“We did jewelry boxes for years, big boxes, boxes with doors, pullouts and drawers. After 15-18 years of doing boxes we finally just gave up. It didn’t really matter how you did it; customers came in and told us the box was really nice, but then they’d ask if we had one with a drawer that just holds earrings. It always needed to be a little different and I thought, you know, I don’t really enjoy this.”

In recent years some of the couple’s best-sellers have been letter openers and earring and necklace holders. Their chopsticks of ebony and bird’s-eye maple have also sold well. What amazes Tom is that they’ve been doing a very similar design all along and no one has copied it yet. But in spite of their success, Tom wouldn’t advise anyone to get into the business today. The emergence of higher quality imports is one of the biggest factors.

Their shop is about ten miles from home. And today, even with three employees, Tom is in the shop about 40 hours a week. The workspace has grown to 6,000 square feet. Two separate milling setups each include a joiner, planer, table saw, and band saw. The shop also includes a metal cutting band saw for cutting brass and aluminum.

There have been other changes over the years. They have three children. Mary used to be very hands onhands-on with production, but now handles everything outside of the shop. Tom admits he was horrible with the office end of things, and Mary getting them better organized has meant a better bottom line for the business.

But they still attend some craft shows & with retail still accounting for 20% of the business. Mary was headed to St. Paul, Minnesota, the day after our conversation to attend the American Craft Council Show, one of their favorites. And after all these years they still love the business and the craft.

“We come up with the idea, design, production, and all of the marketing.” Tom noted, “That’s what I like about it; it’s still so small and simple. If things work, we can take credit for it, and if it doesn’t work, we have to look at it and figure out if it is something we did or a decision we made that caused it to fail. I think that is the beauty of it.”

You can see more of Davin and Kesler at their web site.

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You might assume that it must be a veneer, but Jamey’s coffee tables, end tables, hall tables, animals, desks, baseball bats, bowls, chargers, and, yes, pool tables, are all constructed by cutting, fitting, and laminating solid blocks of wood. Starting just out of high school four years ago, he’s built a growing business, mostly selling to galleries across the country.

Though he’d been using a band saw since the second grade and had built piggy banks for 4H projects, his unique use of lamination was first manifested in a giraffe he built during freshman year of high school.

“I never won any prizes,” Jamey recalled, “so I started building things bigger and bigger and built a four-foot tall giraffe bank with all these random blocks of wood put together. I thought that would win for sure, but some little oak coffee table won. So the next year I built a table out of these small blocks of wood, and I won!”

And that’s how he got started making furniture. “In my senior year, I thought I might as well give it a try.”

Jamey first works out his plans in his head. After settling on a pattern, he carefully cuts each piece. Exact symmetry becomes especially important with the larger pieces, where any variation or error would be more noticeable than in the smaller work. As he builds his blocks, he uses a wide belt sander to take each piece down to the exact thousandths of an inch.

“Almost 90% of my time on a project is spent gluing all the pieces together.”

He doesn’t sell a lot of pieces to individual buyers, and his web site serves more as an online catalog for galleries. Working with galleries required him to adopt a more production approach. Jamey originally built all of his bowls and plates one at a time. So many different patterns made it difficult to keep control of them all. Seven months ago, he decided to just build eight bowls, three rolling pins, and three bats. This provides a consistent product to the galleries and helps him keep up with their orders – often shipping the items within a week.

“They might want four different plates and three different bowls.” Jamey explained, “But baseball bats are funny & some will say they want a couple of them and some say they’d never be able to sell any. Some galleries give them a try and find that the bats outsell the plates and bowls. It’s unpredictable and seems to depend on the market.

To promote his pieces, Jamey twice a year attends the Rosen Wholesale Craft Show in Philadelphia where he can meet with galleries from all over the United States. He also attends the Philadelphia Furniture & Furnishings Show and the One of A Kind Show and Sale in Chicago.

Taking the plunge into business runs in his family. His parents and grandparents run Culver Duck in Three Rivers, Michigan, the third or fourth biggest duck farm in the United States, producing about twenty-five million ducks per year. Jamey works in a freestanding wood shop next to the farm, which is also the source for some of the wood he uses. Much of his walnut, however, comes from neighbors who are tired of dealing with dropping walnuts in their yard and happy for him to come and cut the trees down. Jamey and his family also have their own sawmill.

Business gets better each year, and he now gets help from two part-time employees. They help sanding boards. According to Jamey, every piece is run through a wide belt sander before it is laminated. The sandpaper rips it up a little bit, and little scratch lines make for a stronger joint.

If he can speed up production and get the prices down, he sees adding more people to the production and spending more of his time on the one-of-a-kind furniture like the pool table and office desk. He might also branch out and start doing turning blanks or panels & but wouldn’t use any of his unique patterns.

“I don’t sell many pool tables, but I do sell lots of bats, bowls, plates and rolling pins. The business will probably grow forever, but I don’t think it will come to a point where I can just sit back and just manage things. I want to always be right in there. I enjoy doing projects like the pool table where you just jump into them and figure it out as you go. Bowls and plates are predictable, and I know what to do on those.”

Now back to that pool table. He took apart his grandmother’s pool table to see how it was constructed and get the right dimensions.

“It only took a few days to put the pool table together. The majority of time was spent gluing over 7,000 pieces of wood together. I used 23 gallons of glue. The carving on the four eagles pillars only took four hours & I learned carving just by trial and error. After I built the rail, I went to a local pool table shop and bought the slate from them and had them glue on the rubber bumpers. Since the rail was just little blocks of wood, the bumper caused it to bow in. So I cut the rails apart and reinforced them with aluminum angle irons, and that kept them straight. So I do a lot by trial and error. There are really endless possibilities to what I can build.”

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Steve Blenk, familiar to Woodworker’s Journal magazine readers and the countless people he’s trained, is a perfect example of that. Woodworking was in his blood from an early age. His grandfather was a serious woodworker. An immigrant from Poland, he lived with Steve’s family when Steve was a child.

“He spoke wood better than he spoke English,” Steve laughed. “He was a very careful kind of guy and taught me a few good lessons along the way. Mostly he would look over my shoulder and when I did something wrong, he made a disgusted kind of noise and would grab the chisel and say WATCH!”

That was back in New York, where Steve initially pursued a career in teaching. And when he moved to the West Coast, he worked in the construction trade. But his interest in woodworking prevailed and, 23 years ago, he opened a woodworking business.

“And for some reason or another, I gravitated towards the lathe right away. I liked what I call the ‘Instant Gee-Whiz Factor,’ which is the instant gratification and satisfaction you get on the lathe. And when you really learn to use the chisel, it’s like they become an extension of your fingers.”

Steve is pretty much self-taught on the lathe. Through trial and error, he learned there’s no single right way to work on the lathe, but there were plenty of wrong ways. Fortunately, he found other woodturners who were glad to share their techniques.

“Woodturners by and large are a lot more open about their techniques and tricks than a lot of the other people in the woodworking business. The lathe is a hands-on tool. I could tell you something nine times, but it doesn’t make any sense until you have the tool in your hand. Put 10 good turners in a room and tell them to make something. They all make it, but they make it 10 different ways. They won’t use the same chisels, and they won’t set things up exactly the same way.”

He feels woodturning has come a long way since the 1950s and 1960s.

“In shop classes at high school they would grab 40 pieces of awful end-grain oak and walnut, glue it together in a block. Running at three to six thousand RPMs, they’d go into it with a round-nose scraper, get beat to death by vibrations, and eventually get a depression in the middle of it that they called a bowl. What we had lost was the European concept of shearing, rather than scraping. In the old days turners could walk into the woods in the fall with a jackknife, make themselves a spring pole lathe where they just had a turn and a half each time, so there is no way they could scrape. Yet they’d come out with components to make a bunch of Windsor chairs.”

For Steve the first step is reading the grain on a piece before mounting it.

“You give yourself some options, so when I start to set up a bowl blank instead of screwing it right to a face plate, I might first set it up between centers and move that center point two or three times to show some nice spalting or a bit of fiddleback before I get it roughed out,” Steve explained.

“If you think of the way a block plane cuts,” he continued, “the sole of the block plane is actually controlling the amount of iron you have sticking out, and as long as it doesn’t exceed what can be taken off cleanly in one pass, you will be able to get a smooth cut. A gouge performs the same function. When you’re just taking stuff off, you grab a big old gouge – it’s called a roughing gouge, but I call it a hand grenade — and you go in and blow the stuff out. But when you get to the fine cuts, you’re bringing that cutting edge in tangent to the turning and taking a very fine shaving &the finer the shaving, the cleaner the surface you leave behind. If I move this chisel down about a five-degree angle, all of a sudden the shaving whispers off instead of it feeling like a jackhammer. Ideally, when you make a cut on the lathe you should be leaving behind a surface that at worst should maybe be addressed with something like 180 or 220 grit.

“You work in two dimensions when you’ re wood turning & the shape and the surface. Shape is easy, you can hold a tire-iron up to the piece and it will hack off wood and change the shape. Surface is a completely different dimension. The idea is to leave a surface behind that someone is actually going to want to look at when the lathe is stopped. This is where technique and expertise really come in.”

Steve started the writing side of his business working for American Woodworker. The editors saw him demonstrating Delta lathes at the IWF in Atlanta and suggested he try writing. His degree was in English, so he started by writing a few articles for them.

“I enjoy writing about turning as much as I enjoy teaching. In some ways putting it in a magazine is the best of both worlds. You can teach someone without holding his or her hand.”

For the past four years, he’s also been building a house and feels he’s been somewhat absent from the woodturning scene. Now that the house is complete, he wants to get back out there to see what other folks have been up to.

“I have made everything from half-inch tall goblets to Victorian porch columns. Though there is probably not much new we can do with wood anymore, there’s no end to how we can do it. There is a level of creativity to turning that is kind of absent from any other woodworking tool.”

Asked if he considers himself a master turner, his response is characteristically humble: “Talk to me in another 20 years.”

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“The consolidation of all the companies is complete,” Lou explained. “We’ve consolidated our warehousing structure, our offices, and manufacturing. Everything is now run out of our Elgin, Illinois, facility. Our major receiving and shipping facility is in LaVergne, Tennessee, and we have a distribution center in Auburn, Washington, for our West Coast customers.”

As part of this process, the company focused its brands into two channels: industrial and retail. For the latter group, and the focus of this article, the three major brands are JET power tools, Wilton’s hand tool line, and the high-end Powermatic line. Changes in both the industry and market helped guide the retail alignment.

“There used to be a clear definition of consumer channels and industrial channels and never the twain shall meet.” Lou explained, “but that’s all changing and everyone is playing in everyone else’s backyard. We decided we had to make everything simple and easy for the customer to do business with us.

“The other trend that we saw emerging, contrary to public opinion, was that our ultimate consumer had more leisure time. We’re a white-collar society, and people want to use their hands to make and create things. That’s why woodworking continues to increase at the consumer level. The people who spend anywhere from $500 to $2,000 on equipment for their basement or garage have some serious ideas of what they want to accomplish. Some call it a craft, but I think it’s more of an art. And we think this positive trend will continue.”

JET’s retail outlets provide some information on customers’ motivations and needs, but the company gets most of its insight directly from the consumer.

“If we only relied on our outlets, we’d probably miss out on coming trends,” Lou noted. “We keep in touch with what consumers think and want through telephone interviews and focus groups. We try to cover people who are just entering our market and buying their first piece of JET equipment. And we try to look at people who have entire shops and are now looking at air filtration. Each has different needs. And we try to listen to our professional end-users. It’s amazing what a pro shop can tell you about what’s needed on a piece of equipment, what it should look like, and what features he sees as potential advantages.”

Speaking of air filtration, according to Lou, that’s the biggest trend today. It’s a driving force in the market, as more and more people want a clean and healthy shop environment. Lou also sees the kernel of an emerging trend in noise control & though he doesn’t yet consider it an overriding issue. Interestingly, the ever-increasing price of steel is emerging as one of the biggest trends affecting the industry.

“There’s a shortage of raw material worldwide. Thirty-six months ago, steel was $200 a ton, and now it’s $426 a ton. That’s a huge increase, and since all our pieces are made of steel or iron we’re going to have to face price pressure on our products. If you’re used to spending $849 on a piece of equipment and now it’s going to be $949, it’s probably not going to be a problem. But if you’re upgrading from a $100 table saw, you’re in for a shock.”

When we spoke with Lou, he’d just returned from the big hardware fair in Cologne, Germany, which he described as a booming success for JET products.

“We’ve only been over there [in Europe] for two years, but people are becoming accustomed to JET, and the product is becoming well accepted.” Lou noted, “We took our core products and re-engineered them to conform with the European approach to woodworking. We took our time & launched a few products, and once they were well received, we launched a whole bunch more! So we are very pleased with the results and expect it to grow.”

And, since the reorganization, sales and growth in the North American market have never been stronger. Lou attributes this to the company’s long history of focusing on the upscale hobbyist and professional woodworker market.

“We haven’t tried to meet every price point nor have we tried to turn the world on its ear,” Lou explained, “but I think most of our sales come from referrals. People come to us after seeing their neighbor using a JET tool. Our customers know if they have a problem, they can get the service they need right away.”

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