Warping Wood (or “How to change your life according to The New Yankee Workshop.”)
The New Yankee Workshop may not sound like a go-to source for inspiration on changing your life, but that’s exactly where I found mine over 20 years ago. Master carpenter Norm Abram’s techniques for bending wood unwittingly provided me with real-life analogies on how to correct human deficiencies. It was something Plato referred to over 2,000 years ago as straightening the “warped wood.”
As far back as the 17th Century, carpenters employed three specialized methods of bending and shaping wood. During the winter of 1997, Norm Abram met up with friend and master chair builder Mike Dunbar to learn a detailed process of rapidly changing wood’s shape without breaking it. He referred to it as the “lobster cooker.”
Lobster cooker: Mike’s technique fell under the category of steaming. An old propane tank supplied heat to a lobster cooker (turkey fryer for Midwesterners) on which sat a new, metal gas can filled with water. Next, the can connected via a series of pipes and air-tight fittings to a long PVC tube capable of holding the wood.
By capping both ends of the cylinder, Mike created a “wood sauna.” Strips of wood were inserted into the cylinder and sealed. Once steam sufficiently softened the wood, Mike had approximately forty-five seconds to reshape the wood into a new form before it rehardened.
The two men fashioned a jig using two teardrop-shaped molds standing about an inch high. After removing the wood from the steamer with metal tongs, they hurried it to the table and guided it through a gap in the mold before wrapping it into an “S-shape” around the teardrops. Norm added a pair of wedges and a few wooden pegs to prevent the board from returning to its original shape. As a final step, Mike transferred the new object into a kitchen oven where it dried on low heat until its new form fully cured.
The year I graduated high school in 1994, Norm was back at it. This time tackling a rocking chair project where he employed a second technique called bent lamination.
Lamination: Woodworkers avoid cutting a new, curved shape from existing wood because it creates points of weakness called short grain. Sometimes, the size of the wood makes it too large to steam or bend. This is when lamination provides a strong alternative by gluing thinly sliced, flexible layers together into a sandwich where they become a single, solid unit. Placing laminated boards against a curved jig, designed with the end shape in mind, Norm applied pressure with clamps until the boards moved into shape. They were then given time to dry.
Years later, This Old House asked Norm to share his “Best Tricks of the Trade.” There he fielded a question from Walter in Topeka. Walter wanted to know how to turn a straight piece of wood into an arch and needed a method of bending it and what to avoid. Norm explained a third technique—kerfing.
Kerfing: Kerfing is a technique of cutting notches at exactly the right spacing and depth, providing room to allow the wood to bend into place. This specialized process requires a craftsman with a good knowledge of geometry and one who knows precisely the shape they hope to achieve. Cutting notches deep-and-close together will make your board extremely flexible, but likely to snap in two. Cut your notches too shallow-and-far-apart and your board won’t bend. If you use boards with knots or defects it is likely to create weak-points where the wood is liable to break.
A few centuries earlier and a couple of hundred years after Plato died, an itinerant rabbi and son of a carpenter spoke to the masses in the Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.” Fellow craftsmen in the audience that day (with ears to hear) understood the message Jesus was trying to convey: the softening of wood. The Semitic root of the Aramaic word for meek means the softening of that which is rigid.
The early followers of Y’shu (Jesus’s Hebrew name) were known as the Way. They lived by the way of the wilderness, including daily washing, strict dietary customs and purification. Collectively, this was the Work. After Jesus’s death, the movement was led by his brother James. James famously spoke on how faith without the work is dead (James 2:14–26).
Doing the Work provides us the opportunity to correct the warps in our lives and society. Personal and social upheaval provides heat for a lobster boil giving short windows of opportunity to change. But, as with the wood, we won’t stay pliable for long. We must imagine the future we desire and place jigs and wedges in place that maintain the pressure on ourselves and our politicians to reshape our thoughts, laws, institutions and policies in ways that benefit all humanity. Then, we must stay vigilant so no one removes the safeguards that would return us to our old ways.
With each uncomfortable conversation, every eye-opening book and every stereotype we remove from our minds, we make a kerfing cut with the space for lasting change. As coalitions of humans unite and glue themselves together, bound by a common purpose of a better tomorrow, we laminate ourselves into a new shape with a strength never before possible from wood cut from a single piece.
