Am I doing this right?

By Bob Filipczak
I recently finished one of our classes, “Build a Simple Shaker Style Table” with Don and Tim, and it was a great learning experience. The finished project was just amazing.

During the class I discovered something else–I’m self conscious about my woodworking. 

To be fair, this was a very technical project with a lot of unique cuts and jigs. I may have lost count but I think we used about 8 different jigs to get this table to completion. Many friends have commented to me about how “nice” it looks, but I want to say “do you know what it took, simply to get the legs and apron right?” They will never know or understand, but I know and that’s enough.

The hitch was, while I was doing the class, I was constantly checking myself to see if I was doing the different steps right. I mean there’s a right way to cut a board on a table saw–I do it all the time. When, however, I had two teachers, both expert woodworkers, and the other students watching, I lost a lot of my confidence. I kept asking myself, sometimes aloud, “am I doing this right.”

I think that happened with my first CMWA class too. I know it happens a lot when I show up to Open Shop night. I keep wondering if anyone is watching and catching me cutting something wrong or sanding something incorrectly or even holding the tool the wrong way. 

I think this stems from what I call the “hermit factor” in woodworking, where folks just hole up in their shops for hours and work on projects without a lot of human contact. They don’t consult with other woodworkers. They often don’t even see their families. It’s a very solitary and, I’m discovering, unsupervised existence. That’s part of the charm of woodworking. You figure out your own way of doing things, solving maybe 20 different problems in an hour. You know the right way to do things, but sometimes you find shortcuts or better techniques. Sometimes you fall into habits that aren’t terribly effective. 

But during your shop time, you are the boss, the manager, the project manager and the supervisor. When you step out of the shop, however, and enter our shared CMWA space, things suddenly change. That’s when you start asking questions about your techniques, your shortcuts, your best practices. It can be a bit jarring.

That’s why classes and open shop are so important, even if they are uncomfortable. We have all heard the phrase that we “need to get out of our head.” Likewise, we need to get out of our shop, because we need to take opportunities that force us to ask fundamental questions about our skills, our practices and our approaches to problem solving. Maybe there is a better way? And maybe the only way to find it is through collaboration with other woodworkers. 

Am I doing this right? It’s an uncomfortable question, but it may be the first step to better skills as a woodworker. 

P.S.  When I first started at a woodworking magazine, they hired me to start an ezine, an ancient term for an online newsletter. When we were talking about woodworkers, I asked if they used computers very much, wondering if they would find an ezine useful. It was the beginning of the 2000’s and not everyone was online all the time as we are now. The publisher told me it was remarkable how many woodworkers use computers, he said, and he had the numbers to prove it. He explained that for years, woodworkers all worked in their shops and were rather isolated. Then they discovered the online world, and in particular the message boards, where they could collaborate, solve problems, get tool recommendations and a hundred other things. All of a sudden, he said, they weren’t alone anymore. To them, he added, the computer is just another woodworking tool.