Plumb, Level & Square
Essays from a finish carpenter
by James Jaggers

I hang doors, build stairs, run trim and make cabinets in the mountains around Asheville, North Carolina. I learned the trade from an old cabinetmaker named Alvin Holladay, who took me on in 1974 when I was twenty and had no business holding a chisel, and I have worked for myself since 1983. A few years ago I started writing in a notebook at lunch, sitting in the truck with the door open, mostly about the work, because it is what I think about. My wife said I ought to type some of them up. I don't have a computer, so I do it at the public library on Thursday evenings, an hour at a time, which is the limit. The library ladies have been very patient with a man who types with sawdust on his sleeves.

This is not an advertisement. I'm not looking for work. I have more than I can do until next summer. These are just some things I've noticed.

Monday mornings, before I go anywhere, I sharpen.

I keep the stones on a board in the corner of the shop: a coarse one, a medium one and a fine one, Japanese waterstones that live in a plastic tub of water so they're ready. I take out every chisel I'll need that week and the iron from my block plane, and I set the radio low, and for about forty minutes I don't think about anything except the edge in front of me.

People who don't do this work assume tools come sharp. They come sharp the way a new pair of boots comes broken in. A chisel from the store has a ground bevel and a back that has never been flattened, and it will crush wood fibers instead of cutting them. The first time you sharpen a new chisel properly, it can take an hour, most of it spent rubbing the flat back of the blade on the coarse stone until the scratches from the factory are gone and the steel near the edge shines like a mirror. Nobody tells you that the back matters more than the bevel. An edge is where two surfaces meet. If one of them is rough, the edge is rough, no matter how pretty the other side looks.

After that it's the bevel. I use a little honing guide that holds the chisel at the angle, about twenty-five degrees, though Mr. Holladay did it freehand and could hold an angle better with his wrists than I can with the jig. You push the bevel on the stone until you raise a burr, a tiny wire of steel that curls over onto the back. You can't see it. You feel for it with your thumb, dragging off the back, and it catches like a fingernail on a zipper. Then you go to the next stone and do it again, finer. Then the finest. Then a few strokes on the back to take off the wire, and a few on a leather strop. I put a slightly steeper second bevel on the last few thousandths of the edge, which some men think is cheating. It holds up longer in oak.

The test is a piece of soft pine, cut across the grain. A dull chisel tears the end grain and leaves it fuzzy. A sharp one pares off a shaving so thin you can read the newspaper through it, and leaves the wood shiny, almost wet looking. When I was young I tested on the hair of my forearm, the way the old men did. My left arm was bald for about six years.

Here is the thing nobody believes until it happens to them: a dull tool is more dangerous than a sharp one. A sharp chisel goes where you guide it. A dull one makes you push, and when you push hard on something that doesn't want to go, it goes all at once, and it goes wherever it likes. Every bad cut I've given myself in twenty-five years was with a dull tool and a hurry. Usually both.

But that's not really why I do it on Monday mornings. I could sharpen anytime. I do it first because it's the only part of the week where the work answers only to me. Once I'm on a job, I'm working to somebody's schedule and somebody's budget and somebody's idea of what their kitchen ought to look like. On the stones, there's just the steel and my hands and the sound of the water, and the edge is either right or it isn't, and if it isn't, I can keep going until it is. Nobody is waiting on me. Nobody is going to change their mind about the cabinet pulls.

Mr. Holladay used to say you could tell everything about a carpenter by looking in his toolbox, and the main thing you could tell was whether he took the time. I didn't understand that at twenty. I thought he meant sharp tools make better work, which they do. What I think he meant now is that the edge is the only part of the job that you do entirely for yourself, and that a man who won't take the time for that won't take it anywhere else either.

I put the stones back in the tub. The chisels go in their roll. Then I load the truck and go to work.

There is a hammer in the bottom of my toolbox that I almost never use for finish work. It's a sixteen-ounce curved claw with a hickory handle, black with sweat and age, and the face is worn smooth and a little rounded from fifty years of hitting things. It belonged to my father, Edwin Jaggers, who died in 1991.

My father was not a carpenter. He milked cows in Madison County until the milk price drove him out, and after that he worked twenty-two years on the maintenance crew at a textile mill in the foothills. But he was the kind of man who fixed everything himself, because he grew up in a time and a place where you either fixed it or did without, and that hammer was the tool he fixed things with. Fences. The porch steps. The shed roof, every spring. My mother's kitchen chairs, which he reglued and pinned with finishing nails so many times that they were more nail than chair.

He taught me to drive a nail with it when I was six. He set a block of two-by-four on the porch floor and started three nails for me and then sat down on the steps with his coffee. I choked up on the handle, the way children do, right under the head, and tapped. He let me bend two of the three. Then he got up and moved my hand down to the end of the handle and said, let the hammer do the work, that's what you paid for. I said I didn't pay for it. He said, well, somebody did.

That is still the first thing I tell anybody new: hold it at the end, swing from the elbow, let the weight of the head do the work. You'd be surprised how many grown men drive nails like they're knocking on a door.

The hammer has had three handles. The head is the original. The second handle was my father's work, from a piece of hickory off his own place that he shaped with a drawknife and a rasp. The third one is mine. I put it on in 1992, the spring after he died, because the old one had cracked and I couldn't stand to have it sit there broken. I made it from the same piece of hickory he'd made his from. He'd kept the offcut in the rafters of the shed, I suppose in case he needed another. I took it down and made the handle, and when I was done I sat in the shop for a long time holding the hammer and didn't do anything else that day.

There's an old joke about this. A man says, this is my grandfather's axe; my father put a new handle on it and I put on a new head. Is it the same axe? I've thought about that more than the joke deserves. I think it is. I think a tool is the same tool as long as somebody keeps it working who knew the last person who held it.

I don't use it on trim. A finish hammer has a smooth flat face so it won't mark the wood, and the old one is too rounded and too heavy for setting small nails in good casing. I use it for rough work: knocking shims, setting blocking, pulling the nails some other fellow left. But I use it every day, and I could not say exactly why I don't just leave it on a shelf where it would be safe. Maybe I think it would rather be working. He would have.

My son is sixteen. He's going to college if I have anything to say about it, and I hope he never needs to know which end of a chisel to sharpen. But last month he helped me put up a fence, and I handed him that hammer without thinking, and he choked up on the handle, right under the head.

I moved his hand down to the end. I didn't say anything. I didn't have to. He knew whose it was.

Next page: Plumb, Level and Square, and Working in Occupied Houses »

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Last updated September 23, 1999