Popular Woodworking 2005-06 № 148, страница 76

Great Woodshops

A Writer's Workshop

A funky Victorian-era workspace serves as a shop for Popular Woodworking's editor.

Although space is tight, Editor and Publisher Steve Shanesy is able to cut 4' x 8' sheets of plywood with relative ease in his basement shop.

In the basement of Steve Shanesy's 1870s Victorian home is a woodshop. Like many of today's 50-something woodworkers, Shanesy discovered woodworking only after the corporate world left him longing for a career that involved doing something with his hands. This carefully planned 395-square-foot space, along with his position as Popular Woodworking's editor and publisher, symbolizes his achievement of blending his collegiate skills with a desire to create.

From Shop Rat to Home Woodworker

Shane sy didn't grow up a woodworker nor did he go to college to become one. Instead he attended Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, and earned a degree in journalism. After college he landed a gig working as a promotion manager for the Delta Queen Steamboat Co. in Cincinnati. Two years of blizzard-like winters, his wife's desire to break into the entertainment industry and an overall yearning for something different led his family out west to the Golden State.

While at a party in California, Shanesy met an ex-convict who learned woodworking while in prison. Shanesy, who was quickly tiring of office work, was intrigued. So the ex-con told him to look into a night school woodworking program offered at Los Angeles Trade Technical College. He did.

Shanesy signed up and stretched the one-year, two-nights-a-week, four-hours-a-night program into a two-year program, in part because he was able to use the school's vast array of equipment. But mostly, he wanted to learn all he could from his teacher-turned-mentor, Charles A. Porter (affectionately known as Cap). Porter, a world-class craftsman, is best known for his billiard table designs. In 1981 Shanesy left the school and began a two-year transition from his marketing career to full-time woodworking.

His humble beginning in woodworking, like so many other woodworkers' beginnings,

started in his home garage. A year later he rented a small space in a Los Angeles industrial park. He filled it with a table saw, a j ointer, a few hand tools and some clamps.

From 1983 to 1994 Shanesy worked for high-end commercial and residential furniture makers in Los Angeles and later, in Cincinnati. While in Los Angeles, he worked at AE Furniture Manufacturing company.

"The best woodworking in the United States was going on there on a day-to-day basis," he says. It was the mid-80s, the era of junk bonds. Shanesy says customers would

by Kara Gebhart Uhl

Comments or questions? Contact Kara at 513-5312690 ext. 1348 or kara.gebhart@fwpubs.com.

request 40'-long marble conference tables and didn't bat an eye at the $60,000 quote. "AE did incredible work and had incredible people there," Shanesy says. "I learned so much."

While at AE, Shanesy served as the company's project manager, coordinating all the work that went through the shop. At any one time the company's 25 employees could be working on 150 projects resulting in 1,000 or more parts. In Cincinnati he worked for two furnituremakers, Heartwood Furniture Co. and The Workshops of David T. Smith. During these years he came home from work and, having spent all day in a woodshop, didn't give his home woodshop much thought.

Ten years ago he took on the editor and publisher position at Popular Woodworking.

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Popular Woodworking June 2005