Gumption: America's Gutsiest Troublemakers

by Nick Offerman

  After a few years of this, he added a second tool, a skew-angle block plane, so he had to move to a bigger shed on his farm. Things were going well—two sheds well. In 1988 he moved to an actual eight-thousand-square-foot building in Warren, Maine, and then expanded into an additional thirteen thousand square feet in the mid-nineties. The company is now producing more than twenty thousand individual tools a year and still growing. And you have probably never even heard of a skew-angle block plane, but take it from me—among block planes, Lie-Nielsen’s is the Cadillac.

  On January 2, 2015, my pal Jimmy DiResta and I drove to deep Queens, New York, to a Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event. If you’re not yet familiar with my friend Jimmy, throw this book out the window and go plug his name into YouTube. He has his own channel where he posts his top-drawer homemade videos on making all sorts of items with tools. They are as gripping and impressive as he is handsome (they are quite gripping). When I’m on the East Coast, if I’m doing anything fun in the realm of making stuff, I can usually be found riding shotgun with Jimmy and his equally talented lady pal Taylor Forrest, who works wonders on metal, leather, wood, denim, and Jimmy.

  We walked into the enormous and butt-ugly (gorgeous), old brick warehouse where the event was being staged. It was rather frigid, and the “show” occupied two large rooms, where five or six toolmakers had their wares displayed around woodworking benches, for the trying out of the tools. The air smelled of sawdust and mold, as well as the fumes from the generator that was powering the only lights, as the building’s power had been shut off the day before. The air was filled with the sound of men and some women, mind you, chatting about tools and stuff, and, of course, the incessant, sweet noise of saws and plane blades zipping through wood, as prospective buyers tried out these luscious hand-crafted tools.

  As Jimmy immediately dove into the playpen (he was in the market for a big joiner plane), I scanned the room, and across the expanse I spotted . . . no, it couldn’t be. I wandered closer. He was performing a little card-scraper workshop for a few rapt pilgrims. Good Christ, it was him. Gary Rogowski. One of the greats. Shit, I had learned all my biscuit tricks from that soul-patched sum-bitch twenty years ago! He runs his very own kick-ass woodworking school in Portland, Oregon. What was he doing here? Slumming, it turned out, between speaking engagements, trying to unload some books and DVDs. He was very generous with us plebeians, and I learned three better ways to sharpen my scraper in about twenty seconds. Here was a master, and a jazzy one, at that.

  Then I wandered into the next room and was double gobsmacked. There was Matt Kenney from Fine Woodworking! One of the finest! I had known Matt for a few years, having run into him at another gathering of chisel freaks, but here in this crappy brick room in Queens, it was as though I had just pegged Strider sitting in the Prancing Pony, although Matt is inescapably sweeter in countenance than Aragorn could ever hope to come across.

  We spoke about what a neat get-together this was, and he had this to say about Lie-Nielsen: “During the last ten to fifteen years, there has been an explosion of high-quality, American-made woodworking hand tools. In fact, it’s not unreasonable to say that we’re living in a golden age of hand tools. And I believe that Thomas Lie-Nielsen is largely responsible for this.”

  I replied that I was really enjoying being around a bunch of other folks in Carhartt jackets, none of them clean, except maybe mine, their hands dirty with tool oil and calloused with work. My actor hands were easily the softest paws in the room. Matt had been studiously hogging out an edge dado with a Veritas plow plane when I approached. As he minutely adjusted the implement’s depth, he said that he “had been brought up with the understanding that a man or woman should be able to maintain and operate any object that he or she might own.” That’s something that woodworking with tools like these allows us to hang on to, in a world where I open up the hood of my Audi wagon and it might as well be an X-wing starfighter.

  The presence of luminaries like Kenney and Rogowski was a testament to the strength of the woodworking community. It is truly a band of brothers and sisters sharing knowledge and, when necessary, muscle, and sometimes after that, a delicious brown beverage, or at least a sandwich of savory meatstuffs.

  Finally, I got to the man who was clearly in charge of this hoedown, a rugged, muscled chap in a Lie-Nielsen shirt. He agreed to answer a few questions, so we stepped into the back room. He told me his name was Deneb, after the brightest star in the constellation Cygnus the Swan; last name Puchalski, a name I believe to be of merely human derivation, although I failed to ask him.

  Deneb turned out to be the son-in-law of Mr. Lie-Nielsen, and also his greatest salesman. These hand-tool events were his baby, Deneb explained, conceived when he realized that the larger-scale tool shows had rather too much of a carnival atmosphere to accommodate their small niche of hand tools for woodworking. They came up with these much friendlier “local get-togethers,” at which there were no power tools in sight. Which was good, because there was not so much power, either.

  Interestingly, Lie-Nielsen footed the bill for the event but then invited the other local tool-making artisans to set up their displays all together. “That seems counterintuitive,” I stated, to which Deneb replied, “No, there is not enough of a market for us to really be competitive with each other. If we can continue to inform the community about the quality of our goods, well, a rising tide raises all boats. Our competition is Apple and Sony, anybody who is going after people’s disposable income.”

  Well, this was something new to me. A business that invites its fellow retailers to participate in a small, well, festival, I guess, knowing that any of their sales will help the common cause. This sounded swell, but could the business model hold up?

  I later put this question to Robin Lee, from Canadian toolmaker Lee Valley/Veritas Tools, another top-notch North American firm. He said, “This is going to sound trite—but there is an honesty/integrity that seems to be common to people who work with their hands for enjoyment. We both recognize that woodworking is something that people will do for decades, if not for their entire life. We both assume our customers are coming back at some point . . . and do everything to ensure that happens.”

  These two refined companies, Lie-Nielsen and Veritas, are like if a town had two excellent restaurants on either side of it, and the chefs loved each other’s cooking in a way that it inspired them to make new, better dishes themselves. Lee said, “At the same time as we compete—the two firms are really quite complementary. I often describe Lie-Nielsen as ‘classical,’ where we’re ‘jazz.’ Tom’s line is based on executing the time-tested designs of Stanley tools to a quality level that Stanley never achieved. Our designs are based on a reboot for each plane—taking into account changes in methods of work, available materials, and the capabilities of modern manufacturing.” I was very charmed by this generosity of spirit that is reflected in the tools fashioned by these folks.

  When Deneb started working for Lie-Nielsen fourteen years ago, there were thirty to forty employees. Today there are 100, and they make more than 350 individual tools. This circumstance is peculiar given the fact that they are completely committed to quality over profit. Normal business sense would lead such an outfit to look for places where corners could be cut, or lesser materials substituted, in the way that so many plastics have been introduced into your average automobile, for example. Thomas Lie-Nielsen launched his business with a burning desire to fabricate hand tools the way they ought to be made, and he’s not about to forget it.

  Before I left the tool show, I asked Matt Kenney for an official quote for my book, and he did not have much trouble coming up with a firm opinion, almost as though he reads books: “We should count ourselves fortunate that in the late 1970s [Thomas] recognized a need for better hand tools, and that he was audacious enough to start making hand planes to meet it. And we should admire the determination, focus, and force of personality it must have taken to develop
those early efforts into the company that Lie-Nielsen Toolworks is today.”

  On top of such a commitment to quality, Lie-Nielsen tools also carry a 100 percent lifetime guarantee. That an American company could grow in this way while maintaining an inarguable level of quality and customer satisfaction thrills me to no end. By the way, I should point out that when they say “Made in America,” that is completely what they mean. I was not aware until Deneb informed me that a retail item requires only 60 percent of its labor to be performed on US soil in order to receive that coveted label, which feels like bullshit to me. So much mediocrity has seeped into the regulation of our American integrity that even “Made in America” is only 60 percent true? So some CEO can make a buck, or millions of them? How many of our “American” products are being mostly fabricated in Asia, or Mauritius, or the Philippines, only to have the shoelaces installed in Alabama, so we can pay premium prices?

  Robin Lee added, “A healthy manufacturing base is the foundation of a solid economy. It keeps much of the value generated and the resulting employment at home. If your friends and neighbors are out of work, you have no one to sell product to!” In a world where so many commercial strings are being pulled in curtained chambers beyond our control, one place we can exert our power is in the open market, namely, where our money goes. I can think of no better place to spend my American dollars than on the tools, and the people, of Lie-Nielsen Toolworks.

  14

  NAT BENJAMIN

  One theme that has repeatedly bobbed to the surface in this book is boatbuilding. From Theodore Roosevelt to Frederick Douglass to Thomas Lie-Nielsen, everyone seems to have taken a swing at building wooden boats. Even your author is not exempt—should one choose to pursue the craft of woodworking, it’s only a matter of time before your matriculation runs squarely into the prospect of either boatbuilding or lutherie (making stringed musical instruments such as guitars and ukuleles), if you’re the right kind of goofy. You’ve conquered all the ways to join wooden components at every combination of angles, with or without fasteners, with a mastery of square, level, and plumb. You have spent Gladwell’s ten thousand hours on sanding alone. Your fancy now begins to ponder the daunting undertaking of objects that contain no straight lines whatsoever. Impossible? Definitely.

  Still, you subscribe to WoodenBoat magazine and drift through the pages, finding yourself growing half erect (ladies too) at the merest advertisements for spar varnish. Although you’ve been using it your entire life, you only just now realize that the “spar” in that nomenclature refers to the horizontal wooden poles on the mast of a sailing rig. When you begin listening to Stan Rogers’s “Barrett’s Privateers” on repeat, it’s over. Notify your significant other that he or she should stock up on good reading material because you’ll be building a wooden boat.

  When I was overcome by this particular spell in 2001 or so, I was at the airport, and I realized I needed a book for my flight. As luck would have it, I happily happened upon a paperback in the doorway of the bookstore entitled, simply, Wooden Boats. Fantastic! I devoured it on the plane and learned about a pair of wooden-boat builders named Nat Benjamin and Ross Gannon on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, off the coast of Massachusetts. Their story was as fanciful as any fairy tale to this aspiring woodworker who grew up in the very landlocked region of Illinois.

  Unless this riveting book by Michael Ruhlman was a fabrication, there were actually men and women living in this great land of ours, building boats out of wood, using tools, know-how, and of course, gumption. With this hard proof that the construction of a seaworthy wooden hull was not beyond the realm of possibility, I sallied forth in my own small endeavors, which have to date produced a watertight four-foot cradle/tender and two eighteen-foot canoes. I have mentioned it elsewhere, but it bears repeating: Traveling across the water in a boat that one has fabricated oneself holds an eldritch magic that cannot be described. There is wizardry embroidered into the whole of the act.

  As the years went by, I saw successively greater triumphant achievements from Gannon & Benjamin Marine Railway (the name of Ross and Nat’s company) in WoodenBoat magazine, as well as in a beautiful coffee-table book entitled, simply, Schooner, by Tom Dunlop, which details the construction of Rebecca, a magnificent sixty-foot craft, and then my favorite piece on them, the documentary Charlotte, from Jeffrey Kusama-Hinte. Highly recommended, if you enjoy things like life and beauty. Basically, by that point, Nat and Ross had become, to me at least, the rock stars of American wooden-boat builders.

  I have traditionally found that the greater the craftsperson, the stronger the self-deprecation, and Nat was no exception. His response to my e-mailed request for an interview included, “You’re really scraping the bottom to consider the reprobates at Gannon & Benjamin.” I took my two talented “maker” friends, Jimmy DiResta and Taylor Forrest, with me to Martha’s Vineyard to meet reprobate number one. Even a couple of days after Christmas, Vineyard Haven Harbor had several beautiful antique wooden yachts bobbing in evidence, as we came in on the ferry.

  We met Nat at the shop, aka the railway, named thus for the actual steel rails that run fifty yards into the water, upon which a boat of a weight up to dozens of tons can be rolled into and out of the harbor’s water. It was amazing to see in person the old barn in which I had remotely viewed and read of so much mastery. As in all my favorite shops, the tools and machines were ancient and brown and heavy, thickly squatting upon their cast-iron bases. Our foursome immediately launched into the classic shop-geek rap, admiring exceptional examples of band saw and planer and lathe (pre–World War II!).

  A good boat shop will have a gargantuan band saw known as a ship’s saw, upon which one can cut a curve on an enormously long and massive timber, like for the keel of a boat, while simultaneously slanting the piece through the saw on what’s called a rolling bevel. Considering the modern cost of the tropical hardwoods preferred for such a task, such as angelique, it’s a cut that must be undertaken with a lot of care and no small amount of gumption. Jimmy and Taylor and I admired the ship’s saw in Nat’s shop as he apologized for Ross’s absence. “He doesn’t come out on weekends,” he explained. Sounds like a smart family man. Nat said, “You should most definitely include him in your assessment. He has been my business partner, cofounder, and friend for forty-plus years and is equally blameworthy for the relative success and accomplishments of our boatyard.”

  The pair felt very fortunate to have secured the somewhat ramshackle (read: charming) shop, not only because it sits right on the water, in the perfect location to execute their watery railway transactions, but also because the site very nearly became a fast-food restaurant instead. When Gannon and Benjamin met in the early seventies, as fellow wooden-boat geeks, and gradually determined that they would like to establish a “groovy, casual shop” where wooden-boat enthusiasts like themselves could repair and maintain their charismatic vessels, they set their sights upon the idyllic location where the shop now resides. Unfortunately, a little hamburger concern known as McDonald’s had also just plied their troth to the landowner, to build a restaurant complete with a drive-through.

  Eventually, the discerning residents of Vineyard Haven, who counted among their number some luminaries of literature, entertainment, and politics, came to the rescue and crushed the burger chain’s dreams, leaving the property available to house the Marine Railway. If only all communities could be so sensible. Wooden boat shop or McDonald’s? Think carefully, America.

  According to Nat, people had always told them they were crazy to specialize in wooden boats, when fiberglass hulls were all the rage, not to mention cheaper to mold and maintain than wooden watercraft. Fortunately, Nat and Ross knew, intrinsically, that despite the superficial advantages of a plastic boat, it just didn’t feel as good as wood. It’s like swinging a plastic baseball bat or, in my opinion, reading a book on a tablet versus holding the real thing in one’s hands. Sure, the newer model has its selling points, but
the convenience can’t outweigh the solidity and presence of reading off the page for me.

  I asked Nat himself why one should choose wood over any synthetic hull, and his answer was most satisfying: “Sailing a wooden boat is a symphony of sound above and below deck as the sea rushes by. She also talks to you—a creak here, maybe a groan or two when driven hard. The glow of varnish, salted-down wooden decks, bronze patina, and the structural timbers and fine joinery—all the lovely details give us a visual feast of grace and beauty. And a wooden boat smells so good.”

  There’s an important distinction to be made here: The people who inspire me never seem to be looking to maximize profits. They have an understanding that life’s rewards are to be found much more in the difference between sanding, say, white oak and sanding fiberglass and epoxy. Interestingly, these artisans and freethinkers still manage to lead a life of richness and sometimes even prosperity. I must admit that the more my woodshop relegates itself to solid-wood craftsmanship versus fabricating cookie-cutter items out of man-made “wood” products like medium-density fiberboard, the better we seem to feel.

  Of course, in Nat’s case, he happens to carry onboard a surplus of immense artistic talent to back up his skills on the spokeshave. While the boat shop houses an ever-shifting roster of craftspeople—joiners, caulkers, sailmakers and riggers, welders and carvers, there is an arcane skill that must come into play before any of these other talents can be employed: that of lofting. “Lofting” is the term to describe how a hull’s shape is described by means of its “lines.” If you can imagine the lines of latitude and longitude on a globe and then apply similar lines of sectioning to the shape of a boat, these are the lines with which lofting concerns itself. Enjoyably, the corresponding lines on the curving, slanted stern, or rear, of the vessel are known as buttock lines, which goes a long way toward explaining why your average wooden boat is rocking such a sweet caboose.