Made by Hand (19 page)

This, of course, is an example of the kind of marketing that Edward Bernays created in the early twentieth century. Marketers are constantly pushing new features of consumer electronics and other products as a way to get people to throw away perfectly good stuff and spend money on new versions with faster speeds, smaller packages, more megapixels, greater range, lighter weight, bigger displays, more memory. The truth is, the stuff we already own is loaded with features most of us haven’t learned to use. But people are beginning to get wise to this. In April 2009, Web entrepreneur Anil Dash launched a Web site called Last Year’s Model (
www.lastyearsmodel.org
), which runs testimonials from people who’ve learned to enjoy the older techno-gadgets they already own.

Dash encourages people to send Twitter messages about the way they use trailing-edge technology. Some examples: “My 1st generation iPod mini still plays my songs,” wrote apatino331. “My 2003 Pentium 4 runs Photoshop and Illustrator CS2 . . . AT THE SAME TIME! WOO!” wrote jusuzuki. “Using a 4 year old Sony Cell phone, and damned proud of it! Resist the shiny new toys!” wrote janoallen. “I’ve just repaired my 14 year old CD player, upgraded the parts in my G5 iMac and am hanging onto my old mobile phone,” wrote laceybloke. “Old skool.”

Even though these folks are tweeting about stuff they bought (as opposed to stuff they made themselves), the same idea applies. In fact, making stuff takes the idea one step further. Using cast-off technology to make something new is a way to experience the fun of having something new while getting more use out of old stuff that would have been discarded.

I had so much fun building my stick dulcimer (and playing it for everyone I could corner) that I wanted to make more stringed instruments. The happy enthusiasts at the Cigar Box Nation Web site were very encouraging. Anytime I had a question about building a cigar-box guitar, I’d have a helpful answer within minutes. As a rule, DIYers will go out of their way to help one another succeed.

I went to work on my next instrument, this time using a real cigar box I picked up at a cigar store near my house. I made plenty of mistakes: For the neck I used the same kitchen-table pine, which was weathered and split easily, forcing me to use glue to keep it together. The slots I cut for the frets were crooked; and I didn’t allow for the thickness of the box lid, so the fret board was too low, causing the strings to buzz on the higher frets. As the mistakes piled up, I came close to abandoning the project and starting over but then decided that this would be my practice cigar-box guitar. I was going to complete it and not worry about the mistakes, learning from them so I could avoid making the same mistakes on subsequent guitars. This turns out to be a best practice for DIY. Finishing the job, no matter how botched, will wring the most knowledge out of the experience and lead to better results the next time a similar project is tackled.

It took a couple of weeks to finish the guitar, and despite its many flaws, it played well and sounded surprisingly good. It turns out that cigar-box guitars are forgiving instruments. The sound was clear, and the amplification worked wonderfully. The only real problem was the buzzing sound the strings made when I went past the twelfth fret, so I sanded down part of the lid and was able to go a few frets higher. Shane Speal, a cofounder of Cigar Box Nation, saw a photo of my guitar that I posted along with my description of all its faults, and he commented, “And yet, all those imperfections make it a perfect cigar box guitar. Welcome to your new addiction, Mark!”

With two stringed instruments under my belt, I was more excited than ever to build another one. I’d picked up skills and confidence along the way (I no longer dreaded installing metal frets—what had I been so afraid of?), and there were new things I wanted to try. I started making a list of all the kinds of instruments I wanted to build—a stand-up bass, a cookie-tin ukulele, a banjo, a fretless four-stringer. I daydreamed about the different kinds of paint jobs I could give them and the materials I could use to make them.

For my next cigar-box guitar, I bought a six-foot length of one-by-two oak from Home Depot. I made sure it was flat and straight. It weighed a lot more than the pine I’d used in my first guitar and felt a lot better in my hands. I also bought a small metal miter box from a hobby store to cut the fret slots in the neck. This time I made perfectly straight fret cuts.

To avoid the buzzing-string problem I had encountered with my first cigar-box guitar, I shaved off the part of the neck that attached to the cigar box, so that the surface of the fret board was flush with the top of the cigar box. Remembering Mister Jalopy’s dictum “Screws, not glues,” I screwed the neck to the box with three fasteners. That way, if I needed to make changes or later wanted to use a new cigar box for the body, it would be a simple matter to separate the two parts.

I made a couple of small mistakes, like drilling a hole in a spot that hit a screw going in a perpendicular direction to the hole, but this guitar build went faster and more smoothly than the previous one. The action was low, but not so low that it buzzed, and I could play the strings up to the twentieth fret without interference. When I sent photos to Mister Jalopy and Steve Lodefink, they gave me the thumbs-up.

As of this writing, I’ve built five guitars. Making guitars has become a passion of mine. I’ve given some of them as gifts, and the recipients have been delighted (or at least kind enough to pretend to be). Not a day goes by that I fail to either pick up one of my instruments and play a few licks or think about what I’m going to do on my next build. Building cigar-box guitars has allowed me to touch the core of handmade happiness.

Having grown comfortable using tools to make things out of wood, I decided to try something even simpler than guitars—wooden kitchen implements. Starting off with spoons seemed like a good idea. I already own spoons for cooking, of course, but I’d never paid attention to them. I pulled them out of the drawer to look at them, really look, for the first time. They were for the most part cheap, ugly things. The wood had a rough, almost fuzzy surface texture that I found unappealing to touch.

I had read that cherry wood was a good choice for first-time carvers. It just so happened that I had a large branch from an ornamental plum tree in our backyard. That should be close enough, I figured. It had broken off during a windy day a couple of months earlier, and I was planning on cutting it up into pieces and stuffing them into the trash. It wasn’t a task I looked forward to, so I put it off. Eventually, Sarina lodged it between the living branches of the cherry tree as part of a tent. Seeing the branch every time I walked by gave me a pang of procrastinator’s guilt. But now I could do something fun with the branch. Suddenly it went from being a piece of trash to a source of valuable raw material. This wasn’t a unique occurrence: Ever since jumping into the DIY world, I had found this happening more and more. Stuff I used to throw away—rubber hoses with holes, pieces of chain, electrical cords, scraps of lumber—became useful parts for projects. When life hands you lemons, make lemonade. When it hands you a broken tree branch, make a wooden spoon.

The branch was about six feet long, fairly straight, and about two and a half inches in diameter. It had a somewhat oval, rather than circular, cross-section. It was easy to cut a twelve-inch length using a pruning saw. But when I tried the same saw to make a lengthwise cut (to get a rectangular slice from which to carve a spoon), I ran into problems. I held the section upright in one hand while sawing with the other. The arrangement was unstable; I couldn’t hold the piece of wood steady enough for the teeth to dig into the wood. The saw blade would just jump off the top. The blades were spaced too far apart for this kind of work. I found my miter saw and tried that, bracing the branch against a fence post with my leg. It was an awkward and dangerous setup, but the saw finally started cutting a groove in the wood.

Sawing lengthwise was slow going, though. The wood was very hard, unlike the pine I’d used for my chicken shack. My arm was getting tired, and I’d only cut into the wood about half an inch. This would take forever. Before giving up, though, I decided to try one more thing—splitting the log lengthwise. I didn’t have much hope for success, since (1) I didn’t own a log splitter and (2) I’d never split a log before. Nevertheless, I pulled out my Fubar (a hammerlike tool that had come in handy when I tore apart the paint shack to build my chicken coop) and inserted its wedge end into the shallow groove I’d managed to cut into one end of the log. I tapped the Fubar with a hammer, driving the wedge down. To my amazement, I was able to cleave the wood with little effort. I ended up with a fine piece of stock for making my spoon.

I had a brand-new pocketknife with a sharp blade. This is what I planned to use to whittle my spoon. But I discovered that it was useless on this hard wood. I might as well have been using a butter knife to carve granite. When I researched the art of spoon carving online, the instructions I found referred to special kinds of knives and gouges. Shuffling around my toolbox, hoping to find something that could work, I came across a cheap plastic utility knife, the kind with little blades that you can snap off when they get dull. I tried it out on the wood, and it whittled off shavings quite well. I put on a pair of leather work gloves, sat down in a rocking chair on the front porch, and began whittling in earnest.

I’m a fidgeter by nature. I feel better when I have something to do with my hands. I often keep a lump of rubber artist’s eraser or Silly Putty at my desk to give me something to do while I’m on the phone, or else I’ll start surfing the Web or checking e-mail, which makes my attention drift away from the conversation. But an activity like whittling satisfies my urge to fidget without affecting the part of my brain needed to pay attention to people who are talking to me. I’ve noticed that if I play music while I write or read, I literally cannot hear the music—I just shut it out. But if I’m drawing or painting, I can listen to music, talk on the phone, or hold a conversation with another person in the room. Whittling, to me, is like drawing or painting. My mind can wander but far more pleasantly than if I were just sitting there with nothing to do.

According to Dr. Herbert Benson, the founder and president of the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, the repetitive aspect of knitting elicits a “relaxation response,” which results in lowered heart rate, blood pressure, metabolism, and muscle tension. I suspect that whittling and knitting have similar effects on the brain and body.

In another study, Andrea Price, a knitting-book author, got together with her brother, Eric Miller, a biofeedback practitioner and researcher, to measure the relaxation response of knitting. In their self-produced video, Price explained that she was “struck by the common wisdom that says knitting is a soothing activity,” but when she looked around online, she couldn’t find research that supported that belief. Price enlisted her brother to conduct a “simple experiment right here in his living room.”

Miller attached a sensor to his sister’s finger. The sensor was connected to a computer that displayed Price’s heart rate and galvanic skin response (which correlates with the intensity of a person’s emotional state). Price was not allowed to see the screen as she knitted. To get baseline numbers, Miller had her sit quietly in a chair for a little while. (While Price sat, Miller’s dog came over and began licking her fingers. Wisely, Dr. Miller removed the dog, stating that its presence might affect the results.) After a couple of minutes, Miller asked his sister to start knitting. Almost immediately, her heart rate and galvanic skin response began to drop. Through knitting alone, Price’s average heart rate dropped from 91.45 to 85.64 beats per minute, and her galvanic skin response went from 68.49 to 63.90.

My three-hour whittling session on the porch—interrupted occasionally by conversation with my family and watching my chickens engage in an entertaining (and fortunately bloodless) turf war with a foolhardy squirrel—was marvelous. It was the opposite of Web surfing, where my eyes dance over the pages without reading anything deeply and my mouse finger itches to click on the next hyperlink. As I whittled away without a plan, the rough outline of a spoon began to take shape before my eyes. I felt as though I were revealing the hidden spoon within the wood by removing the superfluous material surrounding it. (This is what Michelangelo said of sculpting: he was freeing the figures from the marble.) A sizable pile of curled shavings accumulated at my feet. The muscles in my right arm burned but in a way that didn’t bother me, at least not enough to snap me out of my whittling reverie. I was having too much fun to stop.