OldTools Archive

Recent Bios FAQ

51837 Graham Blackburn <gbmunc@y...> 1998‑10‑19 Bio
I come from a long line of woodworkers and my parents made every
effort to see that I did something else, but it seems blood will out.
My grandfather was a joiner who walked to work every day of his life,
my father was a builder who was 'reserved' during world war II to
check on the structural integrity of bombed buildings in London, which
involved a lot of nasty crawing about in partially collapsed
buildings, and several uncles had a hard time of it after the postwar
bomb-damage boom slumped in the mid-fifties. So I was sent off to
university to study for a more reliable profession.

Nevertheless, the appeal of wood, building, and especially tools, was
too strong, and all through college and especially at vacations I
worked part-time with an old cabinetmaker in the north end of London
gaining a firm grounding in tools and techniques long outmoded even
then. When I arrived in America (for post grad work in New York) and
got the chance to build a house in the Catskills it was all over with
academe. I never went back to England but instead built houses and
eventually started my own custom furniture shop.

Tool collecting in the sixties was a rare sport and when I ran into it
it often bemused me. When I grew up so much was still common knowledge
that it wasn't even discussed. My school workshop had twenty double
benches with full-length leg vises and wooden bench planes were the
order of the day. Our first term was spent turning a square block of
wood into an identical square block half as big. There was no
discussion of 'chatter', back-bevel, wedge trimming, and other
matters, the master demonstrated and you planed away with occasional
corrections from above absorbing the 'fine' points without question.
It was simply a question of 'this is how it's done'.

Times change and much tradesman's lore has become as arcane as ancient
Egyptian embalming techniques. Now we need to discuss and analyze
every detail on order to reinvent the past. One refreshing aspect of
this, however, is that free of the blind dogmatism of the past, new
ideas can surface, and this is part of the reason I'm still totally
absorbed by woodworking.

Some progress is undoubtedly good, but I have to admit that I do what
I do because I like it, not because it's necessarily better, faster,
or more economical. The books and articles that I've written over the
years are more an attempt to share and explain what I like than than
anything else. I'm sure that in many ways I'm completely wrong about a
lot of things. Most of all I like the feeling of connection I get when
planing by hand with a tool that earned several generations of
tradesmen their daily bread. My most treasured possession is an old
carriagemaker's t-rabbet plane by Moon in St. Martin's Lane, the same
street Chippendale in which Chippendale worked (I found it in San
Diego!). It gives me hope that the past is not totally gone and that
the future is not totally without hope.

==
     Graham Blackburn
     gbmunc@y...
     http://www.blackburnbooks.com

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Recent Bios FAQ