The garage study in its current form, composed of banjos, miter saws, and Norm MacDonald memoirs. Work is occasionally accomplished here. (Photo: Luther Abel)
This past spring, I renovated my garage to make an outdoor office and woodworking shop (unbeknownst to me until very recently, Buckley was a fellow appreciator of the garage study).
While mediocrity at the keyboard and table saw is the most I can hope to achieve with either in the short-term, this was a project — okay, is a project; such things are never truly finished — that demanded the best of me. It is one that, in retrospect, calls for a moment of gratitude as well: Surveying the walls and drawers from my desk today, I’m overwhelmed by the sheer impossibility of the result absent the generational inheritance of tools, shop expertise, and counsel bestowed by my grandfathers and dad.
From as far back as the fuzzily remembered age of preschool, there were tools and woodshops, chain saws and lumber racks. The smell of fresh-sawn Wisconsin pine is a scent the mind can trace to pre-memory.
To name but a few moments recollected:
The power of a Milwaukee Sawzall as I “helped” my dad and maternal grandpa cut through nails, timbers, and reality itself during a house remodel.
The scarlet recollection of our contractor punching a nail clean through his thumb and stopping to take a picture for his wife before Dad drove him to the ER.
My grandpa crafting a chess set for me from bloodwood, walnut, and maple, hand-turning each of the 32 pieces, installing weights within, and cutting leather pads for their bottoms.
Grandpa Selle’s handmade chess set. Crafted from maple, bloodwood, and walnut. (Photo: Luther Abel)
Tools were there, the fruits of their use were all ’round, and I was consciously and passively instructed in their use, abilities, and safest practices.
After the Navy and once enrolled at Lawrence University, I became a part-time apprentice to my maternal grandpa in a basement shop, formerly a Lutheran schule built in the earliest part of the 20th century when German was the primary tongue for this patch of rural Wisconsin. Throughout many projects, I learned woodturning, the practical skill of making use of the tools at hand over the “perfect” one, and finishing — a time-intensive and meticulous discipline that frustrates many beginners. From my paternal grandpa, I learned how to go big: butcher-block workbenches, commercial planers and jointers, and lumber inventory. Most of all, I developed a healthy respect for table saws and kickback.
The impetus for my own garage shop came from a very basic problem colliding with my own laziness: I would mistakenly head to the basement for a tool located in the garage and vice versa. Few things are more infuriating than that brief but molar-grinding trip in the wrong direction. So much wasted effort. I had to centralize the means of production. Still in school, with its relaxed schedule and attendance requirements, and reckoning there’d never again be such an opportunity to spend whole afternoons and evenings swearing at fasteners and rejiggering designs, I began with a vision for French-cleat walls (a brilliant modular design where boards cut at 45 degrees interlock to make modular storage racking). I didn’t have a table saw in the garage, so my grandpa loaned me his Festool track saw to rip down three-quarter-inch birch plywood bought at the dear cost of $104 per 4-by-8 sheet — Covid lumber prices are brutal. Cut down, these slats would be the supports for the matched hangers affixed to shelves and tool holders. Delivery of these panels was only possible thanks to my dad’s orchestrating it with the family Abel Manufacturing truck.
Armed with an arsenal of handy tools — a borrowed Porter-Cable impact driver, a box of GRK screws, a mongrel DeWalt bit set, a chintzy Ryobi countersink set, a loaned ladder, and a DeWalt miter saw — and the understanding of them patiently passed down over the years, I assembled the French-cleat walls over the span of a week. Rassling eight-foot slats of lumber was infuriating at times, but with confidence that my matched spacers (cutoffs of some red oak floorboards I had lying around) were true, the cleats took form. It was beautiful; I was a third-rank deity of carpentry.
Completed French cleat wall employing boards cut at opposing angles to create an interlock. (Photo: Luther Abel)
Work ground to a halt thereafter. Weeks passed as I stood staring at the walls, contemplating my next moves. Building tool holders would require shelves, and I lacked the equipment. My track saw and the gorgeous 50-year-old Craftsman jigsaw my grandpa loaned me were ill-suited to the task. It was finally time to spend some of my own money on tools.
By the end of the purchasing spree, I was the joyful owner of a DeWalt eight-and-a-quarter-inch table saw, the Milwaukee M12 Fuel series impact driver and drill, various Ryobi items to fill infrequent but vital roles, and a DeWalt orbital sander. With these, I cut and assembled everything you see on the walls in the picture above. Because I have used each of the tool types under the tutelage of those who know, the purchases were only concerns of cost, not application.
Here in the garage on a beautiful Wisconsin Friday, I sit in a steel chair that my Grandpa Selle bought in college and type at a desk my Grandpa Abel ran a company from for decades, across from a leather wingback chair my wife’s grandfather brought from England. Behind me is a toolbox my great-grandfather built before my father was alive, before me are framed blueprints that my Grandpa Abel drew — a self-taught mechanical engineer. And here am I, writing about things I’d never know if not for the many men who taught me, freely giving of their possessions and stores of knowledge.
