If You Make Things, You Are My Brother, Archive C, Shelf 7-B: Making A Jarvi Bench

Reader and commenter and all-around swell guy Leon suggested we might like this video. We do, don’t we? It’s one of the better looks into real work in a real shop I’ve seen. There’s lots in it a civilian might not get to see much: steam bending, portable sawmill, and various other barbarous arts and crafts.

I love Mike Jarvi’s energy. That shop has elbow room I could use, too. And three-phase power, I think. He puts it all to use. There’s mad scientist/insane bartender finish mixing at the end too, which I like.

It’s funny that the bench is called “Contemporary” style. It’s like the appellation “Modern.” To me, it suggests a style about eighty years old. To everybody else, they just see the words contemporary and modern and think it’s contemporary and modern, not Contemporary and Modern. It’s just a few years removed from Victorian, really.

So let’s salute Mike Jarvi’s bench making.

But I must warn Mike, I’m sort of a jerk, and I have an impenetrably high opinion of my own work, which boils down to this dare: I can make a bench faster than anyone that can make one better, and I can make one better than anyone that can make one faster.