Steve has been a metalworker for 25 years – MIG and TIG welding, fabrication, machining. His shop has a lathe, a mill, a plasma cutter, a welding station, and enough steel stock to build a car. Three years ago, he added a complete woodworking shop to the adjacent bay. The combination produces work that neither craft alone could achieve: furniture with steel bases and wood tops, cabinets with integrated steel frames, and a creative range that draws from both material traditions.
The cross-pollination between the two shops is most visible in the joinery. Steve approaches wood joinery with the same precision tolerance thinking he applies to machined metal parts. His mortise-and-tenon joints are fitted to within 0.003 inches. His dadoes are routed to the exact blade-kerf width required for a friction fit on the first pass. “In metalworking, you machine to a tolerance and you hit it or you don’t. I brought that mindset to woodworking and my joinery got dramatically better,” he says. His furniture joints don’t need finishing nails or screws for insurance. They don’t need it.
The most impressive pieces in his shop are the combinational ones – a dining table with a welded steel base (fabricated in the metal shop, powder-coated, assembled in the wood shop) and a live-edge walnut top (milled, dried, and finished in the wood shop). The two crafts produced a single piece neither could have produced alone. The steel base has the precision of fabricated metalwork; the wood top has the character that only a natural slab provides. Together they’re extraordinary.
“The best makers I know can do more than one thing well,” Steve says. “Not because versatility is a virtue in itself, but because one craft teaches you things the other can’t.” The metalworking mindset made his woodworking more precise. The woodworking sensibility made his metalwork more intentional. Do you combine woodworking with another making discipline? Tell us about your hybrid practice.