Pegs, planes, dados, and half laps

By Bobby Neal Winters

Writing is like carpentry; carpentry is like writing; and writing about carpentry just seems right to me.  Please indulge me for a while as I do just that.

Planes are useful tools.  You can do a variety of things with them that I am only beginning to learn, but one of those things is very important: Erase your mistakes.

I’ve been working on a small chest of drawers recently.  By small I mean one foot by one foot by one foot.  I’ve done two such recently.  For the first, I put it together with wooden dowel pegs. This went incredibly well until the last step, the final glue up.

When I came to glue the sides on, the geometry of the small cabinet was such that I couldn’t get the dowel pegs to match the holes I’d drilled for them.  With effort, I got it all to come together, but it was slightly askew.

I was careful enough in my photography, that the folks on Facebook didn’t notice--or at least were kind enough not to say.  But I noticed.  

The cabinet is functional, but it’s off. And it bugs me.  It’s good enough to put my tools in, but I can do better.

I wake up early, long before I get up. I think about things.  I spent a lot of time thinking about how I could improve my cabinet.

And it came to me: The problem was with the dowel pegs.  They are quite useful things, but I was using them in the wrong way. Instead of using dowel pegs or screws or brads or nails (shudder) or pocket screws, I decided to go old school and used dados and half-laps.

For those of you who think I’ve just started speaking another language, I have: the language of old-school joinery.  A dado is a groove you cut in a board that goes across the grain.  A half-lap is a joint where you cut halfway through two boards and then join the two together.  

Doing my joinery this way helped me to get the gluing to line up correctly at the last step.

I came out, looked at my beautiful creation, and noticed a gap. I sucked in breath through my teeth.  

The problem wasn’t so much the gap, but that pieces of my framing had come out of line.  This happens in gluing.  You clamp it all together straight, you let the glue dry, but as the glue dries, it contracts and things move.

This is where a plane comes in. (Remember, a plane is a useful tool.)

I took a plane, and I started shaving down everything that was out of line.  This is an incredibly satisfying process.  The worktable and the floor became covered with shavings, but the frame became straight before my eyes.

It is beautiful, and awaits some polyurethane finish as I write this.

There were times when I tried to never repeat what I wrote about.  I didn’t want to bore the reader.  Well, that was misguided in a number of ways.  

The first of which was the arrogant assumption that the reader has so little to do that they remember what I write from one week to the next.  

The second was the arrogant assumption that I’d said all that could be said, in the best way it could be said, or that I was even right about the thing the first time.

Readers are busy people.  They are smart, so they remember a lot, but they don’t remember everything.  Fairly frequently, I am given a compliment on that wonderful column I wrote about X, when I actually didn’t write a column about X. When this happens, I thank the person for the compliment, and thank God for his grace. A person saying something nice to you feels good even if you don’t deserve it.

I began to allow myself to revisit topics.  Maybe I’d gotten it all wrong the first time.  Maybe I learned something new about the topic.  Maybe I’d learned better writing techniques and could approach the topic in a better way.

There are tools in writing just as there are tools in woodworking.  Rewriting an essay is like taking a plane to the frame of a cabinet.  After you’ve written something but before it goes to print, you need to go in and smooth things out.  This involves taking out the words that don’t belong there; adding in some connective supports.

When you send it off to publication, well, it’s done. There doesn’t seem to be an analog for a plane in writing that works after you’ve hit print.  You just have to revisit your topic and eat a little crow, sometimes. Make a new cabinet, as it were.  

But it feels so good when the second one is better.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )