Popular Woodworking 2000-01 № 112, страница 24

A fully equipped Craftsman shop from the 1940s.

Money and inexpensive

machines transformed

woodworking from a skill for an elite few into

a passion for millions.

It had been so long I had nearly forgotten the smell. When I recently pried the lid off a can of orange shellac, the first whiff took me back almost 40 years to my grandfather's workshop. Occupying half of the second-floor apartment where he and my grandmother lived, my grandfather's shop was a mysterious and fascinating place for a child. A rabbit warren of dimly lit rooms housed old f urniture awaiting refurbishing. An ancient table saw and battered workbench dominated the main room, lit by a single bare bulb. A rickety wooden landing out back supported a stool and the handsaw-sharpening vise where grandpa perched, f iling away a few hours every week.

My grandfather and his workshop are inseparable in my memory. Of course, I saw him in the apartment, usually at meals or resting in his beat up reclining chair. But the tidy apartment was grandma's turf, and grandpa seemed as much a visitor there as I was. The workshop was his true home. Over the years my memories of the place had faded, but the slightly sweet pungency of shellac, an aroma that permeated every room and seemed to seep from the old man's pores, brought my grandfather and his favorite spot vividly to mind.

I grew up in a workshop family. Like his father, my dad had a shop, which he shoehorned into half of the basement of our suburban home. Today, my shop occupies two-thirds of a building that would be a garage if there were any room among the tools for a car. Home workshops like my family's can be found across the country in spare rooms, basements or garages. Some, however, occupy custom-made buildings, while others are squeezed into closets. There are shops devoted entirely to hand tools and shops fitted out with state-of-the-art machinery. Every home workshop, grand or humble, is a special place to its owner. While the actual work undertaken there is frequently humdrum, the time spent in the shop is often valued beyond practical accomplishments. In numerous tangible and intangible ways, our workshops reflect our personalities. Just as I can't think of my father and grandfather without conjuring up images of their workshops, I expect that when my children become middle-aged sentimentalists they'll remember me in the same sawdusty setting.

From Necessity to Hobby

Home workshops reflect their times as well as the quirks of their owners. They've been a feature of domestic life in America since colonial days and have changed as the country has changed. What was a necessity on the frontier and the farm has become a center of leisurely pursuits for millions of Americans. Jack-of-all trades home shops, in which a plow hitch or a broken chair leg could both be readily, if rudimentarily, mended, were joined over the years by do-it-yourself home repair and improvement shops. There, paint cans and rolls of wallpaper mingled with plumbing and electrical fixtures amidst an odd assortment of tools.

All-purpose, jack-of-all trades home shops have become as rare as the farms and homesteads that depended on them. The eclectic do-it-yourself home improvement shop, on the other hand, can be found in some form or another in almost every household. While usually not the kind of setup readers of this magazine would take seriously as a shop, these home-improvement workrooms are often incubators for more serious woodworking interests. The bookcase uncertainly knocked together as part of the family room redecoration project plants the seed that several years later has grown into a full-blown woodworking passion, with a shop to match. To be sure, home woodworking shops continue to facilitate household repairs and improvements. But, if we're honest, most woodworkers will admit that our home shops have much more to do with enjoying life than with providing its necessities.

"The measure of a workshop," Scott Landis writes in The Workshop Book, "is greater than the sum of its parts." The workshop, so concrete in its structure and contents, can be surprisingly difficult to pin down in its essence. Unlike many of its parts, the workshop as a whole is always changing. A new tool, a new project, a new shipment of wood, a new passion or whim taken up by its owner, all require rearranging the shop's innards.

Assimilating and reflecting all these changes, the workshop presents a microcosm of the wider world of woodworking. Home workshop evolution can be tracked by examining the evolution of its "parts" — woodworking tools and materials. But the story also flows from currents in society

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