My introduction to craft was mostly accidental. You could blame Karl.
With a team of builders and designers, I spent 5 years restoring a historic house in Honolulu. Early in the project, my architect introduced me to a carpenter. He was known around town for his knowledge of Japanese hand tools, having spent a lifetime practicing finish carpentry, doors and windows in old homes. In his spare time built koa (the coveted and increasingly rare local wood known for its luster) tea tansu with ornate metal hardware engraved with local oceanic wildlife. His name is Karl.
Karl was working on repairing some kumiko that was damaged and replacing cheesy blueish white plexiglass and old, yellowing, cracking plastic paper with a thin flexible plastic backed washi in several screens for lights and doors.
He also was working on this crazy room in the house that was built with windows that are the only double panel glass in the house. Those windows were built inoperable on purpose because the owner who commissioned the windows was supposedly concerned about two things—noise from the Waikiki Shell concerts and home invasions. This previous owner was an interesting one, an SF socialite and trust funder known for donating art to the Honolulu museum of art that turned out to be counterfeit. So I heard.
To back up a bit, classic Honolulu houses are based on the idea of sheltering a house from the intense sun and random bursts of rain with generous eaves, and open gables and windows that allow for the persistent trade breezes from the northeast to cool our interiors.
Back to this room. This sealed off bedroom would only be cooled by AC, and by an HVAC system that produced only the mustiest air, as the insulated cardboard ducts were for sure getting wet and moldy somehow. Worse, closed windows cut off cross breeze to the windows in the adjacent bedroom. So new windows had to go in.
One day someone from another part of the team thought to clean up the site and threw away the demo materials from the existing windows without telling Karl. Upset that someone touched his work zone, he quit. When I told Karl I understood and that I didn’t take offense, he offered me some chisels, a saw and a Japanese plane as a gift. I didn’t really appreciate it at the time.
One day soon at his shop, he gave me a lesson in making a box. Gregarious and confident, Karl likes to talk. So, he kind of talked at me the entire time—I understand now why, as you can’t really set someone in front of a table saw and let them get to it. Too dangerous. I got bored and ran out of time, after literally 8 hours of listening to him talk at me. I left the tools at his place, which in hindsight was kind of rude but I just had to get out of there.
A month later, the October before Covid, I had to go to New York to pick up a custom Tuxedo. (Designed with a friend who is a professional costume designer–a story for another day. ) While planning the trip, I thought I’d see if there was a class on how to sharpen and use these tools Karl had given me, since education like this is non existent in Hawaii. I asked around and my friend Joe Brown pointed me towards this Japanese carpentry school called Mokuchi, run by a classically trained tea house carpenter, Yann Giguere. I signed up for a few basic classes on tool set up and sharpening, and then some private lessons for plane set up and use, and then some advanced joinery and shoji making. I was set to be out there for 3 weeks total with private lessons taking place between weekend group classes.
I had not picked up so much as a hammer in a few decades, being solely the kind of person who works in front of a computer for a long time. But In a borrowed car, with a small cache of tools from Karl, I drove to a small town at the corner of an area in New York just across a bridge from Pennsylvania. Meals were mostly had at the local Chinese food hole in the wall almost every night.
Everyone else in the introduction class had new beginner tools. But the tools Karl gave me were from flea markets in Hawaii. Many of the tools from the old immigrant Japanese carpenters had ended up sold like this, no longer needed by their owners or children who probably had gone on to other professions. That I had brought old rusty tools to class meant it was not that easy to get my edges sharp before the requisite restoration.
Even factoring that element out, I was so much worse than everyone else in the class at sharpening. And to Yann’s credit, he just let me try and try, for several extra hours a day. Because there is really no way to learn this beyond just doing it and adjusting as you go, and building up the strength and muscle memory to sharpen. I remember thinking at that time that my fingers really hurt and I should take a picture of how messed up my hands were from all that practice. Most days it was hard to hold my chopsticks eating dinner at the hole in the wall I had become a regular at.
(It would be a year or two later before I realized how good these ugly chisels were compared to most new beginner tools. Keen although pretty soft, but much less chewy than lower carbon modern tools. I learned this the hard way, being fooled into many new chisels I expected to be better. When I mentioned this to Karl, he said the man he bought them from told him he was able to support his family with those tools, and then paused, and with a raised voice, said, “dont you ever forget that!”)
Hand plane set up was next. Japanese planes are basically descended from Chinese push planes, and are essentially one (or two blades, later, historically, when chipbreakers would arrive from western cultures) embedded into a block of white Japanese oak. Japanese white oak is sort of a miracle, both tougher and more flexible than American varieties. Flattening the back of a blade, and sharpening its bevel, then fitting it inside the dai (the wooden block) took a few days at first try, even with a small plane. After scraping away certain sections of the wooden block’s sole, it was possible to pull a basic shaving.
The shaving was thick, and uneven, and made a noisy, heavy sound as the blade moved through the grain. Compared to the see through ultra thin shavings of professionals or the people who compete in hand plane contests, a beginner’s first shaving is nothing to write home about. But it was a working plane.
With plane and chisels set up, it was time to move on. The next few classes, I would use these tools to make my first joints.
Continued in part 2
