Marcus Sly - Furniture Making and Design

In The Nature and Art of Workmanship, David Pye talks about the "workmanship of certainty" - i.e. mass production, where the situation and machinery is so controlled that it is impossible for the operator to ruin the work, and "the workmanship of risk" - skilled work where there is always the danger of a mistake ruining what is being done.  This second approach could also be called the "workmanship of uncertainty" as I was reminded this morning.  The glue up of an oak bureaux had gone well the night before, and I came into the workshop in the morning to remove the clamps and clean up a couple of the through-tenons. Using a Japanese saw I cut the piece of tenon protruding beyond the panel off, and planed back the remains, and the surplus glue.  This is always an exciting moment - a definitive step from one world to another: the moment when, if we're lucky, or skillful, or both, the ugly timber and surplus glue is startlingly transformed into beauty.

There were revealed three patches of endgrain with a horizontal dark line where the wedge was driven in.  One was near perfect, the other two were still pretty good.  Each one was different - the end-grain and subtle imperfections giving them all an individual character of their own.  I reflected on how enjoyable it is to work with things that are never entirely predicatable, and in which even the smallest details have their own personality....