On Wed, 13 Jul 2005 08:13:55 -0500, "Swingman" wrote:



Your remarks about "appreciation" are right on ... many folks don't know
quality from K-mart these days because they've never experienced it, and the
current idea is that a kitchen cabinet's life is less than 15 years.

Makes it increasingly tougher to justify doing good work, commercially, with
that prevailing wind ...

(I am betting that is one of the reasons an obviously skilled, world class,
artisan/cabinetmaker like Tom Watson is now "retired" ... and a damn shame
that is).


Let me start by saying that your kitchen is positively immaculate,
Swing. Well conceived and well executed.

But, I did not get out of the game for a lack of appreciation, I got
out for a lack of stamina.

I wasn't old but my knees were, and my back.

I'd have stayed in if they had.

I've been sitting on my ass mostly for the past eighteen months and my
joints don't hurt much anymore.

But my gut and ass have gotten bigger.

I probably carry twenty pounds of fat that I didn't have two years
ago.

When I first went onto the shop floor at my new job to look at
work,checking for conformance to specifications, the mechanics hid
from me, like they would from any clipboard carrying sonofabitch.

Now they call me up and ask me for advice.

I'm pretty satisfied with that.

I reckon it's a sort of appreciation.

As far as actual cabinetmaking goes, I've cut out the parts for my
Goddard-Townsend Kneeholes, and selected the appropriate curly cherry
for the drawer fronts, which shall be carved, with great trepidation
and joy, into a simulacrum of the shells that I have seen in my dreams
for years.

And I don't have to worry a lick about when it gets done.

I didn't even tell my wife that I was working on them.

My sense of appreciation comes from inside of me, as I suspect it does
in all good mechanics.

When I was a carpenter, I didn't expect the contractor to tell me what
a nice job I'd done on cutting in the Baldwin lock and hanging the
entry door; I knew that the cheap ******* had hired me because I was
one of about four people that he knew who could do the same thing.

And I happened to answer the phone first.

I loved and revered my trade as a carpenter and I did the same as a
cabinetmaker. You ask Tommy Plamman about this and he will say the
same.

The world has moved on. You are right in saying that we do not have
as large a base of people who can appreciate good work - but a good
mechanic has already solved that within himself.

He knows that he is doing it good and right and that is how he was
taught and that is how he does his work.

It is not really the appreciation from outside that drives a good
mechanic - it is the memory of those that he learned from, and the
desire to earn the respect of those mechanics who are no longer even
alive, that drives them.

To be accounted "a good mechanic" by those who still know what that
means - is enough.

I mean that - even if your judges are long dead - their approval is
enough.



Tom Watson - WoodDorker
tjwatson1ATcomcastDOTnet (email)
http://home.comcast.net/~tjwatson1/ (website)