Straight, Square, and Strong

By Bobby Neal Winters

I am the kind that likes to create a parable, and then when the reader least expects it, do a zig and get to my point.  Please bear with me.

I share some of my carpentry projects on my Facebook page.  I like the medium for sharing in the sense that if you don’t want to look at it, you can just scroll past it.  It’s like writing in that way: If you don’t like it, just skip it.  This appeals to me because I don’t like imposing myself on anyone.  I’ve been cornered too many times by bores; it is a burden we good listeners bear. 

Anyway, I’ve just finished a small chest of drawers.  It is one foot cubed in size.  I put the knobs on it yesterday.  It is the second such chest that I’ve built.  I’d documented the first on Facebook as well. The pictures looked nice. Everyone praised it, but then they would: my friends are nice.  

But I knew that it wasn’t as good in real life as it looked in the pictures.  Angles are tricky things.  You can photograph something that is crooked from the right perspective, and it will look straight.  That happened in this instance.  I had to tell people I was a better photographer than I was a carpenter, but that isn’t really true either.  Sometimes accidents help us.

Looking at what went wrong the first time, I set about to correct it. To make a long story short--and remember what I said about having been cornered by bores in my time--I figured out a better way to go about my cabinet making.

In building something--a cabinet for example--there is what you see and what you don’t see. There is the final look you want at the end on the outside, but there is the structure that actually holds everything together on the inside.

You want the outside to be pretty, to be visually appealing, to reflect well on you and your skill at the craft.  At the same time, you want the interior structure to be straight, square, and strong.  And you want it designed in such a way that you can assemble it without undue stress.  (This last is particularly important if you have taken up the craft for the specific purpose of stress release.)

Given the above, I decided to make my interior structure something that was mostly invisible.  Each drawer would sit on a frame that I would make using halflaps.  I would then join these frames to vertical supports with edgelaps. Then at the end, I would cover it with side panels.

Previously I had used the side panels as structural elements and everything had gone awry at the final gluing. 

So, I did all that.  I used one-by-threes from home depot for the inside.  I ripped them down the middle to make the vertical supports. The wood for the interior frame didn’t cost much more than 10 dollars. I used my saw and my chisel, and I glued it all up.  It was straight, square, and strong.  

But it wasn’t particularly pretty. Here we get into an interesting area that is one of continual struggle for me.  What I had just built would have functioned just fine to hold some drawers to put my tools in. (This is what we weekend carpenters do: We buy tools to make things to put our tools in. Don’t laugh. It works for us.) But it would’ve been ugly.  We have built-in expectations of what a chest of drawers should look like.

Because of this, I took what I’d built that was straight, square and strong, and I put side panels on it.  The side panels cost at least as much as the wood for the inside structure, but they were there for purely cosmetic purposes.

However--and if there is any lesson from this it’s coming now--they were much easier to put on after I got a good straight, square, and strong interior support.

This provides a point of departure to discuss a number of things.  I’ve had occasion over the last 16 years in my job in the Dean’s office, to talk to a lot of students who were in trouble.  What I learned there is that if you want to be successful in school, in work, in the world, begin by having strong stable support at home. Put differently: Be straight, square, and strong on the inside, and it’s easier to keep things in order on the outside.

This is in harmony with what I’ve learned as a teacher. If you want to do a good job teaching a class, you need to know what you are teaching.  You will know it better as you teach it, but you have to begin as a learner. To show someone how to be a lifelong learner--and if we don’t do that at the university, then what the hell are we there for--we must ourselves be lifelong learners.  We must be straight, square, and strong on the inside before we can model that for our students on the outside.

To do any of this, we don't rely on what others tell us. They only see what we let them see. We’ve got to look at ourselves honestly, using objective measures.

And if we don’t do it right the first time, we start over.  Maybe more than once.

Okay, I am going to let you go there. I see I’ve had you cornered for too long.

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.