First Things First (May 2026)

Robert Carver — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 21:00:00 GMT

During a recent Shop Night Live, Tom McLaughlin quoted Jere Osgood (1936-2023) as saying “A straight line is a missed opportunity" to create visual interest in a design. True though that may be, straight, flat surfaces are a woodworker’s friends when it comes to joinery. When you move from design to creation, cut the joinery before making the curves. Even if the curves are the dominant feature, the joints come first.

To cite a simple example, consider a table with turned legs. It might be tempting to shape the leg first and then figure out how to support it while drilling or chopping mortises, but one would soon discover that it’s easier, more accurate, and safer to work out the joinery when the work piece can be secured flat to the bench, drill press, mortising machine etc. This applies all the more so to cabriole and other curvy styles. One big challenge in chair-making is that it’s often necessary to use a specialized jig to hold a turned part so that you can drill a round mortise (aka a hole) to receive a stretcher.

Thinking through the order of operations is imperative in the shop. For some operations, you probably already have well-established routines, as when preparing stock or sanding parts beginning with coarse grits and progressing through finer grits. Similar logic holds for applying finishes. If you perform a task often enough, you don’t want to be figuring out the order of operations each time. It’s far better to have a tried-and-true sequence of steps so that you don’t paint yourself into a corner, so to speak.

At some point in learning secondary-school algebra, we learned about “order of operations”. Remember learning how to tackle an expression like 6 + 2 x (5 – 2)²? Close your eyes and you might hear your middle school math teacher’s voice instructing you. You had to overcome years of training about proceeding left to right and learn a new set of priorities.

Airline crews and astronauts have detailed pre-flight checklists, athletes have pre-game warm-ups, orchestras have a well-established sequence to tune up before a concert. Surgical teams follow a Universal Protocol, including a Time Out, before every operation. The participants don’t invent or improvise the drills in the moment. There may be leeway to deviate or modify the steps well before “game time”, but never immediately before the main event.

Fun fact (I believe; please correct me if I’m wrong). Traditionally, tuning begins with an oboe playing a concert A (440 Hertz); according to the Rockford Symphony Orchestra website, “the bright, rather penetrating sound of the oboe was easy to hear, and its pitch was more stable than gut strings.” Other stable instruments like woodwinds and brass come next, followed by lower then upper strings, whose tuning is least stable. A cellist friend once explained to me that his cello could drift out of tune on the short walk from a backstage green room to his assigned seat on-stage.

In all of the above examples, the starting point is chosen for reasons of logic, technical requirement of the equipment and environment, safety, etc. Generally speaking, there’s too much at stake to simply dive in without forethought. Careful preparation may not have been invented in a woodshop, but the habits of mind that we develop as woodworkers turn up in many domains. First things first!

Maintain Your Equipment

Tom Shirley — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 20:44:37 GMT

Measure Twice, Cut Once June 2025

Rob Carver

Personally, I find little joy in adjusting, cleaning, aligning, oiling, waxing, and otherwise caring for my machines and hand tools. I’ve gradually come to enjoy and feel confident about sharpening edge tools, though hand saws are a different story. And the larger power equipment like the table saw, lathe, bandsaw, jointer, planer, etc. require different skills and time expenditure. Still, being lucky enough to have a shop in a separate outbuilding with little in the way of climate and humidity control, I’ve accepted the mission of keeping up with fundamental machine maintenance. It’s a lot less work to keep up with and avoid light surface rust than it is to restore a rusty or corroded tool. This is one case where an ounce of prevention truly is worth a pound of care.

I suspect that we all have different philosophies and approaches on this matter. Based on numerous FIG meeting shop tours, some differences stand out. Of course, we get a skewed impression inasmuch as a relatively small number of members are able and willing to host a FIG meeting. Often, the host comments that it took a long time to clean the shop to get it presentable, but some level of regular attention is necessary to keep doing accurate, safe work.

Depending on the non-woodworking activities we pursue, there are obvious analogies in our lives. Especially for those of us in the so-called Golden Years, the maintenance of our bodies becomes a pressing priority. Common sense calls for attention to the health of our bones, muscles, brains, and guts whether or not we’ve previously been in the habit. Household appliances, lawn mowers, and cars demand similar attention, as do plumbing fixtures and roofs.

On the job, as I’ve noted in prior essays, it’s essential to keep up with developments in our chosen fields. Best practices evolve and new technologies appear. It’s so easy to fall behind without constant vigilance, and that is a form of maintenance and periodic overhaul or reconditioning. Taking an on-line certification or attending a workshop might be a form of maintaining our skill/tool set.

For navigating the sometimes-bumpy road of life, I’ve also found value in working to maintain one’s sense of balance, humor, compassion, and equanimity. People who study such things say that we can develop our resilience and ability to adapt – I’d call that a valuable way to maintain some very important tools.

And, as in the shop, it’s so much simpler and more efficient to do such maintenance work when things are in relatively good working order than to wait and build back after too much degradation. As summer approaches and the humidity rises, take some time to look after the iron in your shop and the metaphorical rust elsewhere.

This will be my final essay for the current year. I’ll take July and August off, and look forward to a next installment in September. As always, I’m open to suggestions. What wisdom have you acquired in the shop? Please let me know.

Eastern Massachusetts Guild of Woodworkers Measure Twice, Cut Once - Wisdom From the Shop Articles

First Things First (May 2026)

Maintain Your Equipment