From the bench
Jul 03, 2026
A position paper, submitted respectfully, by somebody who has filmed more of them than he has poured.
A void is worth filling when the table would otherwise fail. That's the entire test.
There are two kinds of hole in a slab. One is structural: the piece will move, crack further, or come apart without intervention. You fill that. You fill it because it's carpentry.
The other kind is a hole you've decided to have feelings about. Filling that one with two hundred dollars of resin, then lighting it from beneath, is not carpentry. It's set dressing. It photographs beautifully and it is the single most reliable way I know to add four thousand dollars to an invoice without adding four thousand dollars of furniture.
I'm not a purist about this. I own resin. I use it. What I object to is the sequence where the material leads and the object follows — where somebody buys a slab because it's ruined, so there's somewhere to put the river.
There's also the part nobody films: how a thick pour behaves in a south-facing window in year six. I've quoted on three repairs this year that were all the same repair.
Build the table the wood wants to be. If that table happens to need resin, use resin. If it doesn't, you've just saved yourself a considerable amount of money and I've just talked myself out of a bigger invoice, which regular readers will recognise as a pattern.
Jul 29, 2026
Every object in your house was made by somebody who stopped.
I was once told, fairly seriously, that the phrase "good enough" wasn't allowed in a workshop. The standard offered instead was that you keep going until you genuinely cannot do it any better.
I understand the intent. I even agree with the intent. But as a rule it's slightly dishonest, because nobody actually works that way. Everybody stops. The question is only whether you're willing to say where.
"Good enough" is just a tolerance with an unflattering name. A drawer that runs sweetly at sixty-eight degrees and binds at ninety is not a failure of character; it's a decision about wood movement that somebody made and hopefully wrote down.
So I write mine down. Every piece leaves here with a note saying where I stopped, what I'd have done with another week, and what you should watch for in year three. It takes twenty minutes and it has never once cost me a sale.
The alternative — implying you never stopped — is a nicer story. It's just not one you can put in writing.