Figuring out the details on your own

First, I wanted to send along a heartfelt thank you for everything you do at Fine Woodworking; with the exception of the occasional YouTube video, I have learned to woodwork over the past two years exclusively through reading your articles, watching (and rewatching) the video workshops, and listening to every episode of the podcast (twice).

I recently built Garrett Hack’s Shaker side table from FWW #104 (1994). I begin all my projects with a detailed rendering in SketchUp, and it was an interesting challenge to render the design from the single 30-year-old drawing in that article. As great of an illustration as it is, there was of course a good deal of missing information that had to be deduced. I came to look at it as a puzzle created for me by Hack and the illustrator, and I think I learned more from the information they didn’t include—and I had to work for—than what they did.

More information came from the article photos and the few other photos that exist online of Hack’s table. The process really made me respect what early readers went through when trying to build a piece from the magazine, without any schematic downloads or CAD files to be found. And I think it made me a better woodworker, more willing to make an informed guess about how something should (or could) be done and get on with it, rather than worry too much about whether I was getting a measurement, proportion, or dovetail angle exactly right.

Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but I like to imagine the illustration from the article saying, “Here is enough to get you started, but the real learning will come in figuring out the rest on your own.” I don’t think we get enough of that kind of thing these days. In the end, I don’t think I got it exactly right, and I figured out pretty quickly that I would never find enough good-looking bird’s-eye maple to approach the beauty of Hack’s piece. But it came out pretty good, and I’m looking forward to years down the road when the maple has honeyed a bit and the pear has darkened, as Hack’s did.

—WILL HUBBARD, Climax, N.Y.

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