Jesus Woodworker and the Decision to go CNC

After reading the last 2 posts you're probably wondering what a "Jesus woodworker" is.

My friend Lee Weitzman and I jokingly coined the term many years ago to describe a type of individual who would sometimes come into our employ as cabinet-makers.

It has nothing to do with religion.

To hear Lee describe it, a "Jesus woodworker" is a person who is so caught up in the craft of woodworking that they are oblivious to the notion of producing anything in a timely fashion. Taken to the extreme this type of artist/craftsperson will consider it their sacred duty to spend countless hours in meditation with a tree in order to intuitively discover what the tree wishes to be made into. Upon discovering this Truth in a moment of Zen the artist/craftsperson will then embark on a painstakingly long and time consuming process that will one day (hopefully) result in an actual piece of furniture being made.

If this happens to be the kind of furniture making process that stirs your gravy - no problem.
But do it on your own time, and don't pursue it as a vocation on someone else's dime.

My definition is a little simpler than Lee's because it simply acknowledges the Biblical Jesus of Nazareth as a woodworker who had the ability to walk on water.

In that context a "Jesus woodworker" is a person who feels that they too have the ability to walk on water - if only because they too are woodworkers.

Over the years I have met more than my share of cabinet-makers who suffer this affliction. Sometimes it comes from one who is older, and already set in his ways.
Other times the attitude would come from one of the young bucks - fresh out of school.
With diploma in hand they figure they already know more than I ever could.

In my lifetime the greatest archetype of a "Jesus woodworker" to ever cross my path showed up at my shop in late 1994. For the purposes of this post I'll refer to him as "Tom" (acronym for The Omnipotent Master).

By late 1994 we had so much work coming in that we were compelled to hire more people.

Tom was one of the applicants who showed up looking for a job as cabinet-maker. His resume seemed to check out, because he had worked at some of the better shops in the area. I still remember the interview, because my heart went out to him as he told me his sob story about being out of work for so long and not having money to buy Christmas gifts for his kids. I too had young kids and had suffered the downturn, so I decided to give the guy a chance.

Tom had more than his share of trouble getting up to speed. At first I tolerated his mistakes in the belief that our processes were new to him and he simply needed time to adjust. But even the simplest of tasks were tripping him up.

One day we were making Concerto Tables, which have a round wood top set into plywood rings. The grain pattern of the inset tops were diamond matched (as illustrated below) and in order to make them round we used a brad point bit to partly drill a 3/8" dia. hole into the underside of the top at the point where the veneer seams meet. This hole was then used to set the top on a pin, where it would be spun on an overhead router to make it round.

I gave Tom clear instructions on what to do, and left him to complete the job.

Upon my return a short while later I was shocked by what I saw. Each of the tops had a 3/8" dia hole drilled clean through the face.

"What the heck did you do?" I asked.

"Oh, I thought it would be easier to drill down through the face rather than measure from the underside" was his reply.

"But you drilled a hole clean through every top. What are we supposed to do about that?"

"Umm, maybe we could just putty it in."

"Are you nuts? This is high end stuff. You don't putty that in. And besides, where did you get it into your head to do it this way? I clearly explained what to do, and you didn't do it. Why?"

(What comes next is Tom's answer to this question, and I am not making this up)

"These tops getting screwed up are actually YOUR fault, because nowhere on your drawings does it say NOT to drill a 3/8" hole through the face."

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. He was blaming me for his own incompetence.

At this point I had to take a deep breath because in this moment of clarity I found myself fully aware of the fact that I live in an egalitarian country where it's not against the law to be stupid.

However, it is against the law to slap someone upside the head for being stupid.

With that in mind my thoughts suddenly raced to the world of mathematics. I knew how much I was paying Tom per hour, and how much his drug, dental and medical plans were costing me. Add in the statutory holidays, sick days, EI insurance, EHT, pension plan contributions and all the other costs of keeping this guy in my employ - and when my mental calculator punched out a total I suddenly realized that the hourly cost of giving this guy a paycheck every week was virtually identical to the financing costs on a 5-Axis CNC machining centre.

It was not difficult to figure out what my next decision would be.

Considering that I have always been an equal opportunity employer, I decided to give all the other employers an equal opportunity at Tom's services.

To use a sports analogy, Tom was now an unrestricted free agent.

How Things Get Made in My Shop

Before explaining how a "Jesus woodworker" can be detrimental to a shop such as mine, it is first necessary to explain how things actually get made around here.

Most woodworkers doing the kind of custom work I do tend to function as a one person shop. This kind of arrangement works well if you're making furniture as a sideline or hobby, and not depending on it as your primary source of income. Ideally this kind of set-up also requires an extremely low to non-existent overhead, which usually means working at home out of your basement or garage. Under this latter arrangement it would be difficult, but not impossible, to eke out a living in most circumstances.

In my own situation the economics of being a full time furniture maker requires me to operate on a less than tiny scale. This means I need to have people working with me to help defray the costs of running a shop such as this.

In 1992 I was working with a staff of 5 people, namely 2 cabinet-makers; 1 helper/machinist in the woodworking area; 1 finisher; and 1 finisher's helper (who also did polishing). Although I was tremendously hands on with all pieces being made, my day to day reality involved many distractions including telephone calls with customers and suppliers; dealing with quote requests; creating/revising drawings; ordering materials; and general day-to-day trouble-shooting.

Although the 5 people working with me were doing their various assignments independently, they were not really doing things on their own as much as they were doing things by extension from me. For example, let's say I was looking to build a custom dining table. I would make drawings and give them to one of the cabinet-makers - explaining how I wanted it made; what wood to use; how to run the grain; where to put mortise and tenons, etc. Typically this cabinet-maker would already be familiar with most of the nuances of what I wanted done, so he could pretty much proceed on his own without too much hands-on direction from me.

The helper/machinist wouldn't report directly to me. Instead he mostly worked by extension from the cabinet-maker who was himself working by extension from me. I would oversee the cabinet-maker, and the cabinet-maker would oversee the helper/machinist.

My finisher also worked independently, but also by extension from me. I would explain to him what kind of colour/finish/sheen I wanted and he, in turn, would work his magic to tangibly create whatever it was that I wanted to have done. His helper, in turn, would work by extension from him - often to sand and prep things as required by the project.

Collectively the 6 of us functioned as a team, which meant that I effectively had 6 pairs of hands creating my work, instead of just one.

Over the years this type of dynamic has usually worked well for me, provided I could maintain a shop size of roughly 7 people. This number always seemed to be the proverbial sweet spot for some reason, and I invariably learned that once that magic number of 7 got exceeded speed wobbles would usually appear somewhere in the shop.

During the 1980s when we were extremely busy we often had as many as 20 people working in our shop. Although the extra manpower did result in higher output I also found that the larger staff size created inherent inefficiencies. For example, a productive cabinet-maker who could easily manage one or two helpers could quickly be overwhelmed if he was called on to manage a small crew. With large numbers of projects being in the shop at one time details would sometimes fall through the cracks and mistakes would inevitably get made. These mistakes then required either me or one of my more experienced people to make things right again.

Finding a happy balance was always difficult during these times, because there was never any way to accurately predict how much work was coming in. Although we did occasionally not take on work, turning customers away was always something I tried to avoid as much as possible.

When we were at our busiest in the 1980s I began to explore the idea of integrating some CNC equipment into our shop. CNC is an acronym for Computed Numerically Controlled, and this is essentially a machine that utilizes a computerizer software package to generate code the will accurately cut and/or rout parts to particular shapes and sizes with extreme accuracy and efficiency. The precise logic of CNC appealed to me immensely, because the only mistake it could ever make was the one you programmed into it.

For me to admit thinking about CNC, let alone using it, is considered heresy and sacrilege to many in the studio furniture community. However in my mind a piece of CNC equipment is merely the latest advancement in the evolution of tools used by an artist or craftsman.

Today, for example, there are many studio furniture makers who feel quite comfortable using hand chisels to craft their work. To the furniture makers of ancient Egypt, however, the iron chisels of today would seem like advanced technology compared to the crude and soft copper tools they had available to them. In a similar way one can look at a table saw as a major technological advancement compared to the old way of hewing wood by hand with an axe.

I spent many years ruminating over the idea over going CNC, but it was never with an eye to automating my work. Rather, I ultimately viewed this technology as merely another tool that could also be utilized as an extension of my own hands.

Given the nature of the work I do, there always has been and always will be a considerable amount of hand work required in the making of one-of-a-kind custom pieces. These aspects of craft can never be automated cost effectively on a one-off basis. And having said that, I really don't think that using CNC to cut a table top into a perfect elliptical oval shape is in any ways compromising the integrity of the work just because the same shape wasn't created using the old school string and pencil technique.

Times change and we need to change with the times. Otherwise we as a species would still be hunkering down in caves, grunting back and forth in debate over the relevance of rubbing two sticks together for fire.

But I digress...

I ended up spending the better part of 5 years agonizing over the thought of going CNC.

Thanks to a "Jesus woodworker" I finally saw the light.

The Journey Continues (Pt. 12) - Ramping Up Again

Having experienced the severity of the economic recession of the early 1990s I had surprisingly mixed feelings about the surge of new work coming in from places like Brueton. Although one part of me was thankful to be busy once more, there was another part of me that dreaded the thought of ramping back up to warp speed again.

When we were at our busiest in the 1980s I was constantly working long hours, including evenings and weekends. This made it difficult to do simple things, such as spend time with my young family. Although it was tough to decelerate the business as orders dried up, it was also a welcome relief in some ways because I was simply burned out.

During these down times I began to sketch out all kinds of ideas of furniture concepts I wanted to have made. This became a surprisingly enjoyable exercise and it had an almost meditative quality for me. Deep down I loved the creativity of it all - conceiving ideas; sketching them out; then figuring out how to go about making them into reality. The latter part was easy because the science of making was something I had down to a fine art already - after years of taking other people's ideas and transforming them into finished product.

The first prototype I ended up taking from sketchbook to bench was a Biedermeier style desk - very similar to the Rainforest Desk shown below.
An old bundle of Myrtle Burl veneer that had been stored away for years was used to make the inset of the top, while offcuts of Macassar Ebony were utilized to make the apron, legs and plinths. Not long after the desk was completed I was fortunate to have it sold - to an author who was looking for an inspiration place where he could write his books.

The success and sale of this first piece - especially one that was wholly of my own creation - actually inspired me to consider scaling my shop down even smaller, to focus exclusively on making and selling my own designs. This fantasy, however, was short-lived because the economic reality of the situation had its own facts and figures.

For one thing I was now the father of 3 young children, and as much as it might be righteous and honourable to pursue the path of the starving artist - also starving one's family in the process was not a viable option.

In addition, despite how cool I thought my furniture pieces were, the marketplace as a whole was not sharing my enthusiasm. Aside from the initial desk sale, three consecutive years of displaying at IIDEX did virtually nothing to stimulate any interest in my designs although, to be fair, the recession going on at the time wasn't conducive for sales either.

Around 1992 or 1993 there was also a Call for Entry for furniture designs to be submitted for an upcoming book entitled "Conservation by Design". This was a collaborative effort by W.A.R.P. (Woodworkers' Alliance for Rainforest Protection) and the furniture design program at RISD (Rhode Island School of Design) to select tangible examples of sustainable furniture designs. I was thrilled beyond belief at this opportunity to be published, and felt certain that my Rainforest Desk would be one of the pieces selected.

Sadly, of the 76 furniture makers accepted for publication, I wasn't one of them.

About a year later there was another Call for Entry - and another rejection - once again from RISD. This time it was my "Tower of Power" that bit the proverbial dust.


It was shortly after we started ramping up with Brueton that I had a lengthy discussion with J. Wade Beam on what my business focus should be. Wade advised me to abandon my efforts to develop my own pieces and focus, instead, on being an OEM supplier to companies like Brueton. At the time this seemed like sage advice, for a couple of reasons.

First, given the rejections I was getting it seemed obvious that my furniture pieces weren't resonating with the more knowledgeable design academics of the world. Second, thanks to the recession there was now a seismic shift under way in the way in which companies had their pieces made. Making things in-house was now falling out of vogue as more and more designers began to outsource rather than invest in their own production. (Of course, taken to its extreme this ultimately led to the almost complete offshoring of production that we now see today).

As the 1990s wore on our base of OEM clients expanded to include not only Brueton but also Vladimir Kagan, Rick Shaver, Monroe Sherman (Sherman Designs), and Lee Weitzman. To keep up with the growing influx of work we were soon compelled to expand the size of our staff.

Although I was never keen on having large numbers of people working for me, in many ways I had little choice if I was going to keep my customers happy.

But it was only after I hired a "Jesus woodworker" that I decided to go CNC.