Bruce wrote:

>>"I spend my days in a confrontation with wood, an ornery thing that defends
itself with meanness and tenacity when you fight it mostly with hand-tools."<<

Goodness gracious. Is this tongue-in-cheek, or actually the way you feel about
wood? What a striking difference with how I deal with wood. I grew up working
in my father's woodworking shop from an early age and see wood as material
that is easily broken down and rebuilt into any shape, form or assembly that
can be thought up. I now think a lot of this is based on experiences that I no
longer remember, as I was about 7 when I started. I do recall when my dad
first showed me how to see wood with a microscope.  We looked at wood, old &
new, in different forms from sawdust to finished furniture and went outdoors
to poke and prod the trees, shredding bark and wood, knowing how it grows and
decays. Root-wood is different from branch-wood, but I can't remember what
it's good for. A while after that he was teaching me how to sharpen edge tools
using the microscope again for a close look at the process and result. It was
easy to see and imagine the steely edge slipping under the chip of wood,
slicing the cells. We built stock watering tanks for the farmers out of Red
Elm, split the staves by hand with a froe, and beveled them on the power
joiner. "Six foot stock tank? John'll have it ready by lunch." I was 13 and
the work seemed to flow from idea to object, almost without effort. We had a
36" diameter bandsaw set up like a little sawmill. We'd get Walnut logs that
had been underwater and half buryed in the creek bank for decades or longer.
My dad would caress the surface of the log, and put my hand under his so I
could feel it too. It was like we could reach into those logs and feel  the
wood  deep inside, straight or swirling grain patterns, pockets of decay,
stones. As the boards dropped away from the log, there it was, just like we
knew. We once made a few stock tanks out of a walnut log because it was too
full of stones at one end to saw. A couple of those Walnut tanks still water
the stock out there in eastern Nebraska, long after the Red Elm ones rotted
away or were staved in by the cattle. When I was in college we went over to
the Ag Campus and soaked a 1"x6" Red Oak board in liquid nitrogen fertilizer
for about 10 minutes, then tied a half-hitch in the middle of that board as
neat as you please. Lots of precautions due to the liquid nitrogen, of course,
but no struggle with the wood. Wood is that stuff that does what you want, all
you have to do is think it up. For me working with hand tools is far easier
that machinery. Of course, hand work takes time and there is the matter of
time and money. Finding the balance between hand & machine, time & money is
simply (or not so simply) a matter of business. But all that work with my dad
was commercial work, as is my hand work now. This is probably why I ended up
in old-house restoration and preservation work, where was, and still is, is a
market for that hand work and knowledge.

John Leeke, Preservation Consultant.
(used to be: John, The Woodworker, but my motto is still:
By Hammer and Hand Great Works Do Stand.)