DO-IT-YOURSELF : Indulging Woodworking Instincts

The machinery of do-it-yourself can be as comforting and nurturing as a mother’s breast. Or as harsh and final as a hanging judge.

The basement or garage woodworking hobbyist finds solace wherever he or she can. For every project butchered, there’s always another tree growing out there. And, faced with ultimate disaster, the woodworker nonetheless starts out with one more finger than a cat does lives.

The economics might seem irrational. The $5,000 home workshop proudly turns out weeks later a coffee table that goes for $199.95 at the discount furniture store.

Pride of authorship? Peter B., a young obstetrician who turns out newborns and woodworking with comparable skill, was asked if he ever made anything inanimate from trees that did not contain a mistake. The burled maple dining-room table for his wife? The pencil-post beds for his sisters? Thesailboat? The post and beam addition to the house? Cupboards? Countertops?

“No,” he finally said.

The many trials and even more numerous errors of home woodworking may result in nothing more than bulky kindling for the wood stove. But they do produce that rarest of commodities in an overhyped universe: candor. Hobbyists dwell not so much on the glory of their completed handiwork as the stripped screws, mismarried dowels or puttied-over gouges encountered along the way. The footstools and headboards are loved the more for their imperfections, a personal acknowledgment of fallibility.

Norm Abram seemingly can turn out a Shaker armoire on TV’s “Yankee Workshop” in half an hour. The average hobbyist embarking on a new project can’t even find where he left his marking gauge from the last one in that time span. (He also knows that if you believe everything on TV there’s a bridge in Brooklyn for sale by the Tooth Fairy you might want to invest in.)

Do-it-yourself seems like a new craze only because the foundries of Taiwan and Malaysia have put the sophisticated tools of the trade within reach of even moderate budgets. Actually, it’s nothing new. What is most commonly found in caves of Paleolithic man? Tools. Hand tools. These instincts endure today. Hardly a man alive--and some women--can enter a hardware store and exit unencumbered. He may never use that tenonning jig--the instructions are in Chinese--but it’s there in his very own cave.

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Damned if I remember what Mr. Besson taught us in third grade. Fractions, I suppose. But I have total recall of Paul Runyon’s manual training classes where we sandpapered everything in sight. Death awaited if you put a block plane down on its cutting edge instead of its side. (Some guy in “Fine Woodworking” said this was a fetish. A plane is meant to cut wood. Sure, if what you’re resting the blade on is wood. If not? Death.)

Higher education neglects refinement of these early skills, totally overlooking that much of a successful life is avoidance of paying someone $60 an hour to make or fix something you could do if you hadn’t been dulled by Latin I-II and “Silas Marner.”

Familyhood, out of necessity and nesting instinct, usually awakens the dormant Paul Runyon within. Junior pegs something through a window late Saturday. You either fix it or heat the outside until Monday and a $45-an-hour glazier comes around. A leg on grandmother’s heirloom end table goes adrift or a rotund guest leans back too far in the Windsor chair.

Challenge and response, as primeval as the woolly mammoth.

By now you have a shelf of such household first aid as hammer, glue, three screwdrivers and a 67-foot folding ruler with six inches broken off. One day you have a 2-by-6 and need a 2-by-4. You gulp, take the egg money down to Sears and buy a table saw and there’s no turning back.

Table saws take extreme caution and sometimes fingers. Band saws don’t--not often. Play safe. Get one. You discover that a router can make molding a lot cheaper than you can buy it at the lumberyard.

Drill presses drill straighter than your hand-eye. Like wire hangers mating unseen until closets are overflowing, your tool racks become densely populated with generations of screwdrivers, chisels, gouges, planes, punches, nail sets, knives, squares, files, cement trowels, spacklers, tighteners and looseners.

You are sinking ever more deeply into tool catalogues, at least three of which arrive weekly. What once was rationalized as nest maintenance now is addictive. Self-justification--that you really acquired this mess for a purpose--compels the next step: remake, enlarge, create.

Coffee tables are a good place to start. The legs are vertical, the top horizontal, everything’s a right angle or should be and the end result will be out there in plain sight for everyone to admire.

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What wood to use? Mahogany. Works easily. Takes a nice varnish finish, which resists stains. The specialty hardwoods people sell luscious slabs of Honduran mahogany quite a bit cheaper than a moon rocket and not much more than a heart bypass.

(Years after manual training, Paul Runyon, who repaired classic furniture for the Metropolitan Museum and was a famous maker of miniatures, gave me a piece of 75-year-old Cuban mahogany that was quite simply sensuous to work on.)

Such wood saws like butter. That’s the trouble. One slip refining a piece with a router or shaper or planer and in an instant you’re left with a small fortune of stove wood.

Electric woodworking tools turn at furious speeds and are less forgiving than Socrates’ wife, the ultimate shrew Xanthippe. The risk only multiplies as piece is added to piece and you approach the finished whole with an apprehension doubled with a tensity of nerves such as racked William Tell drawing a bead on the apple atop--only barely--his son’s head.

Pushing the envelope, you decide to inlay the edges of the top with contrasting wood. Above the shrieking of the router you hear a door slam. The momentary distraction leaves a small crescent in what was to have been a straight channel. Nothing to do but change router bits and cut a larger channel on all the pieces successfully machined already, compounding the risk of subsequent error.

(That’s what Dr. Peter B. meant in his confessional--the best-laid plans, etc.)

Well, the average house only has room for so many coffee tables. Like Alexander the Great looking for more worlds to conquer, you lift up your eyes to the house itself. This is high-stakes Las Vegas because this is, literally, where you live.

The nice thing about houses is you don’t rout them, inlay them or French-polish finish them. A miscut by one-sixteenth of an inch is not the end of the world.

You can, of course, underestimate load factors and see your coffee table suffer when the overburdened roof collapses.

But then if it doesn’t, and Mrs. D. asks you to make her a coffee table just like yours, you can share a satisfaction common to the lowliest house wren:

You feathered your own nest.