Router, Dresser, and Injury

I became obsessed with the look of rounded edges on wood furniture. I looked into how rounded corners are made by woodworkers, and found that people use router tools with curved bits. I bought a handheld router as a gift to myself on my last day of college.

I began rounding the edges of all the wood furniture in my room

The router was my first power tool for fine woodwork. I had a circular saw and a drill, and had used some power tools in the sculpture lab in school, but didn’t get much experience with them. I don’t think I appreciated the power and danger of the tool at the time.

Dresser

One night, I found a wood dresser left out on the street and brought it back home. It was similar to the other wood furniture in my room, but it was a bit too big to fit anywhere. I decided it would be good wordworking practice to tailor the piece–take it apart and hem all the dimensions in a bit, and then give it the rounded-edge treatment– to match the other furniture in my room.

Changing the dimensions of the dresser involved disassembling each drawer completely and cutting a few inches off each side, and then putting it all back together again.

Eventually, I got the dresser to this point. I still had to remove a bit off the top (where the screws are in this photo) and create new drawer pulls.

My idea for the drawer pulls was one long 2x2 bar on each drawer that was rounded on the edges, and with a finger groove carved out of the bottom side.

I bought a rabbeting bit for my router and the next day I tried carving out the finger grooves. I couldn’t figure out a good way to do it, and the next thing I knew, I was carving out a groove in my finger.

Typed into my notes app:

Right hand

Middle finger 

First knuckle

I’m in my ER room. Waiting. 

I knew what I was doing was unsafe. 

The router tool was upside down

I was using it like a routing table. 

I am worried thinking about what this means for the shed. 

The tools aren’t unsafe, it’s the user. It was me. 

I don’t want to think about whether or not insurance will cover this

I was trying to make drawer pulls for my dresser

I even thought how ironic it would be to injure my finger while making a slot for my finger to pull the drawer. 

I was using the tool and almost got hurt with it

It kicked back and broke the wood and the bit flew off like a copter propeller and landed 15 feet away

Among all the red flower petals fallen from the coral tree 

The red bit was hard to find. 

That was a message 

I thought to myself

A message that I should stop pressing my luck

A message from god that I was too stubborn to listen to. 

But not too foolish to miss. 

Then I had a few more kickbacks and dangerous moments. 

But I carried on

and I actually got a better control on it

Then I 

Agh I can’t even write 

I pushed the wood too far and it kicked back or whatever I don’t know 

But my knuckle hit the bit

Which I actually bought last night at Home Depot

And I knew instantly I was fucked

I saw crumbs of bone in the cut

Blood started rushing

I yelled out to my parents

I hate seeing them panic 

Dad and I got in the car 

My finger wrapped in a wash cloth

It was a slow drive on a beautiful day

Passed by many people on nice walks and bike rides 

We hit bad lights and kept having to stop 

It was almost funny

My dad stopped at a yellow light when the metro train was coming

And we had to wait a minute there

Looking back now I realize how little that mattered

I have been waiting for hours now

3 1/2 hours 

So bored 

So Fucking bored 

I don’t want to think about the pain

I wish I could just get it wrapped up in plaster now or a splint 

I hate being here 

Even if I find it sort of interesting

I just want to reach out and feel my pain with somebody else

Not maya or my parents or anything 

I don’t want to burden and worry them

Not the nurses or doctors

Whose job requires them to emotionally disconnect from their patients 

I want to reach out to the other ER patients moaning in pain down the hallway 

I left the hospital the next night with my hand wrapped up and immobilized, with a 3 inch pin through my middle finger. I had severed my extensor tendon and broken the bone at the joint.

Maya helped me finish the dresser after the injury. We came up with a different drawer pull solution.

We used clothesline rope and rivets for the drawer pulls.

After a year of use, I wouldn’t use this design again, especially not with the kinds of fancy drawer slides I used, which require a strong amount of force to open.

I returned the router to Home Depot a few days later and got a full refund.

Plywood Bookcases

In June 2020, a few months after building Blair’s Books, I built a pair of plywood bookcases. I had gotten a circular saw for my birthday, and it was my first time building something at home.

They replaced a pair of laminate wood bookcases in my bedroom.

I built them to be a few inches narrower than the previous bookcases, to give more elbow room to the reading chair beside them. I also integrated a reading light for the chair into the bookcase.




Blair's Books

I built my first piece of furniture in February 2020: a bookcase made of pine wood boards.

I was taking a sculpture course at the time and I wanted to learn how to use the shop tools. I had also just inherited a collection of books from a deceased family friend and needed a place to store them. I decided to make a bookcase to match their dimensions perfectly, so there would be no excess space on any shelf, no room for any more books, since the collection of a dead person is essentially complete. The books also created a portrait of Blair, their previous owner, through his interests.

The plan was: to build a bookcase as a reliquary for a collection of books→show it as a sculpture→live with it for a period of time (which turned out to be one year)→decide which books I wanted to keep and clear out the rest→keep the bookcase and use it for my own books, as furniture. The piece’s status would shift from Art to furniture over the course of its lifetime.

I showed the sculpture for my final critique on March 12, 2020 (which turned out to be my final in-person critique of college. The cancellation of in-person schooling was announced the day before, so our professor wasn’t allowed to be there. He Facetimed in instead.)

I lived with the bookcase for a year, during quarantine. When moved out of a gallery context and into a domestic space, its status as art became much more precarious. It was distinguished from the other furniture in my room by not being freely usable to me, since it was filled with another person’s books. The only way to maintain the integrity of the work was treating like art, instead of furniture. I began cataloguing the books, and then each bookmark and annotated page from Blair in each book.

Blair’s Books with books arranged by genre

Blair’s Books with books rearranged by height- a total of 11cm shorter

A year later, I was invited to show the piece at Punto Lairs Inc. When it was shown again, I decided to rearrange the books in order by height. When I had originally made the bookcase, the books were arranged by genre, and then the height of each shelf was dictated by the height of the tallest book on it. Rearranging them by size meant that the bookcase was the shortest it could be- 11cm shorter than it had been originally. I thought this made the concept of the bookcase fitting the books “perfectly” more visually clear. And, arranged by height, the books were still mostly separated by genre, since most of the novels were small and most of the reference books were large.

I adjusted the heights of each shelf and then chopped 11cm off the top before showing it again.

Full bookcase on first day of show

Bookcase on last day of show

I installed Blair’s Books at Punto Lairs Inc., inviting visitors to take a book with them. By the end of the show, most of the smaller books had been taken, but, predictably, the larger, obsolete programming books had stayed.

I brought the bookcase back home after the show and donated the books I didn’t want to keep. Then the bookcase began a second life in my room as ordinary furniture. I adjusted the shelves again and filled them with my own things. I even added a little side-shelf for a reading light next to my chair.