Shaker-Inspired Sewing Counter

As much as this piece is a homage to Shaker design, it is also quietly a love letter to both hand tools and shared shops.

- Kenan Orhan

I work in the Kansas City Woodworker’s Guild, a shared shop with a fleet of Sawstops, bandsaws, jointers, planers, drill presses, mortising machines, wide-belt sanders, lathes, a panel saw, router tables, CNC machines, and innumerable handheld power tools. The entire lot of equipment would rival any commercial shop (all for the low membership due of about $100/year!). For me, the most stunning feature is the hand tool cabinet containing all of the Lie-Nielsen hand planes and saws in production, even the special joinery planes. I’d trade all the machines (except maybe the bandsaw) for that cabinet. The cabinet is the bench room, a space designated specifically for handwork and separate from the machine area.

The swipe of a plane, the shush of a saw, the tapping of a chisel. I find happiness in these quiet, pleasing sounds of work at the bench, where sawdust gathers in soft piles and shavings thinner than paper roll along the floor. I find happiness in my tools that facilitate the desire to do good work by their very existence. Far away from the buzzing, shouting, and biting machines of the shop, this calm setting has, at its heart, an intuited expectation of precision and craft, leaving my head clear and ready to do work worth putting my name on.

I prefer to work as far from machines as I can. Most of the time, it’s too loud, dusty, and distressing for me to justify setting up and using a machine across the shop when there’s a beautiful handsaw right there. Besides, as I mentioned, the guild is a shared shop which can, on busy days, mean a line to get to the chop saw or one of the jointers.