My father, Ian Agrell, was not always an easy man to understand, but I felt closest to him when I was alone in his workshop. When I couldn't sleep I snooped through his stuff, hoping to discover something about him. I usually ended up at his workbench, where he kept his box of wood-carving tools. He had about 100 of them, and I'd take them out and pretend to carve. Some were delicate enough for dentistry; others had blades like serving spoons. Nearly all were more than a century old. Dad had acquired them as a member of the exclusive Master Carvers Association, which was founded in 1897. Tradition dictates that when a member dies, his tools are divided among his peers. Most of Dad's tools must have belonged to a carver named A. Holland, because that name was stamped into many of the custom-made handles?some carved into dense spirals, others elaborately fluted. A few were utilitarian, and simply chamfered and tapered. Dad said you could tell a carver's character by his handles.
The best way to understand wood is to sculpt it with hand tools. A single cut might start with the grain, then go against it, and finish by moving across it. Every cut must be clean and bold to be successful, so it's paramount to keep the tool on the wood as long as possible. A carver has to constantly adjust his approach to navigate the wood's natural whims. That could mean changing the angle of attack or the way the tool is forced through the wood. Most carvers work with a mallet made of lignum vitae, a dense tropical hardwood. Typically, a carver taps the tool three or four times before pausing and repeating the pattern: tap-tap-tap-pause, tap-tap-tap-tap-pause. A busy workshop becomes a mesmerizing cacophony of overlapping rhythms.
On my 11th birthday Dad gave me my first set of wood-carving tools. They were cheap Chinese chip carvers with rough handles and pathetically dull blades. I used them mostly as screwdrivers. At the time, I was living with my mom and two sisters. Mom was an English teacher and never without a red pen, which she wielded liberally, correcting grammar even on handwritten notes we left lying around the house. When she wasn't grading papers or our notes, she was up a ladder turning our 19th-century cottage into a home. She made all the repairs herself; as a single parent, she couldn't afford not to. Dad had given me a few power tools, such as an electric drill and a jigsaw for which I had only one blade, so Mom put me to work. Together we painted rooms, hung shelves, and repaired furniture. When our street finally got a gas line, in 1990, Mom installed a fireplace and commissioned me to build a mantel, which I cobbled together using old ceramic tiles and a pine 1 x 6.
Dad became obsessed with wood carving as a child growing up in Somerset, England. He'd get bored in church, so he killed time studying the playful carvings scattered throughout the building. He'd try to find a Green Man?a face hidden within the stylized foliage?but mostly he enjoyed the crude, low-relief scenes carved into the choir stalls. They were often comical and sometimes raunchy. His favorite: a fox biting a man's testicles while a cat sat nearby, laughing.
Not long after turning 15, Dad joined the army. He was required to have a hobby, and since he hated sports, he chose art. His teacher happened to be a wood-carver, and soon Dad was replicating the decorations he remembered from church. After seven years of service in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, Dad became a civilian once again and met my mom. They married, and Dad became a salesman for Xerox. The job seemed to have everything: a stable income, promotions, and a company car. And at the time Xerox was the Apple of its era, leading a technological revolution with its photocopiers and fax machines. Dad hated it. One day he quit, enrolled in art school, and told my mom he was setting up shop as a wood-carver. "The only time I whistle is when I carve," he'd say. My parents' marriage fell apart soon after.
I aspired to be Thurston Moore, the front man and guitarist for New York?based alternative rock band Sonic Youth. That was my grand plan in 1993 upon completing the English equivalent of high school. Instead, I was faced with a choice: Stay in England and attend college, or move to California and become my dad's apprentice. With my long, scraggly hair and plaid shirts, I didn't need much time to make what was a life-changing decision. I wanted to build an electric guitar that looked like Moore's beat-up 1960s Fender Jazzmaster, and my dad had a well-equipped workshop.
He had moved to the United States in the late 1980s. He and a fellow British carver, Adam Thorpe, had noticed there were no commercial carving workshops doing the kind of architectural work they were producing. In pursuit of their American dream, they went into business, first in Denver and then in San Francisco.
No longer working out of a funky basement, Dad ran a 2500-square-foot shop in a former shipyard. A half-dozen wood-carvers tapped away at sturdy benches, and a mill shop churned out noise, dust, and custom furniture. The only items I recognized from England were his box of wood-carving tools and the skull, which peered down from a bookshelf in his office.
Most mornings he taught me carving, and in the afternoons I worked in the mill shop. I spent hours with Scott Richter, the cabinetmaker, but we barely exchanged a word. We didn't need to. I studied his technique simply by holding the end of the board as he maneuvered it through the jointer, table saw, or thickness planer. At the end of the day I swept the floors. Dad insisted I never receive any special treatment. My co-workers obliged; most of them called me The Boy. In fact, they still do.
I promised Dad I'd never touch the power tools when alone in his shop. Of course, I couldn't resist. One Friday evening after everyone had left, I was flattening a slab of maple to use as a neck for my Jazzmaster. As I pushed it through the jointer, my right thumb slipped off the board and into the 18-inch cylindrical blade head. The corner of my digit disappeared among the wood chips. My first impulse was to cover my tracks by cleaning up the mess. But when I realized the bleeding wouldn't stop, I tried to call an ambulance by dialing 999. In Britain that gets you emergency services; in America it gets you an error message. I eventually reached Scott, and he rushed me to a medical center for a skin graft.
When I started my apprenticeship, I figured Dad would give me his wood-carving tools. He was too busy managing the workshop to carve, and they were gathering dust. Instead, on my 18th birthday, he handed me a brand-new set of 25 Swiss-made Pfeil tools wrapped in a roll of thick green cloth. They were high-quality, but I was disappointed. They lacked the finesse of Dad's century-old tools, and their manufactured ash handles were devoid of character and history. It was clear Dad expected me to earn his tools, just as he had as a master carver in England.
There is no easy way to sharpen wood-carving tools. Get it wrong and you cannot carve. Really screw up, and you destroy the tool. The traditional method uses slip stones and strops and is both tedious and inefficient. However, it also produces the sharpest edge. To sharpen a gouge, the carver places its bevel on the stone and rolls it side to side to grind away the metal. The trick is to cut a 10-degree bevel that's perfectly flat lengthwise. If it's shallower than 10 degrees, the gouge chatters along the surface of the wood instead of producing long, confident cuts. Any steeper and the edge is weak. After working through progressively finer stones, the carver burnishes the edge with a leather strop.
Dad could sharpen a gouge this way in minutes. It took me hours. When I sharpened a tool successfully, I tested the blade by scraping it gently across my forearm. If it shaved hairs, it was sharp enough to carve sugar pine. But if I switched jobs and had to pound on a chunk of oak, I had to resharpen my entire set by cutting an inside bevel in each tool to strengthen its edge.
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