In your intro, you mentioned "cross grain gluing".  What the heck is that?

Wood is always swelling and shrinking along the grain as it absorbs and expels moisture. Gluing a piece across the grain inhibits this movement, resulting in the board splitting at its weakest point, or in extreme cases, erupting like a volcano when the pressure of the shrinking wood exceeds the strength of the glue trying to hold it.

So is all this stuff for sale?

We're not really trying to do internet sales just now.  The pieces displayed here are a sampling of things I've made recently: they don't represent a line of merchandise.  We have this site so that local customers can see the kind of things we do. 

OK, how do I become a local customer?

It helps to live in southern New Hampshire or northern Massachusetts -- close enough so that we can get together to plan the project, and to have us deliver it when it's done. 

Do you use machines like Norm, or do you build things by hand?

Both. I use the basic machines, because anyone who doesn't is either soft or is working for an antique village. However, some jobs are easier using hand tools. For example, a board that might take ten minutes to belt sand can be smoothed in thirty seconds with a hand plane.

How about joinery? I've heard that if it doesn't have dovetails, it's crap.

Let's see.... In the eighteenth century, a wood screw cost the equivalent of maybe $10.00, and a pound of nails was worth a day's wages. So a woodworker had the incentive to cut joints which is absent today, in the age of cheap and very efficient fastners. As I see it, these days there are three kinds of joints: the necessary joint, the optional joint, and the decorative joint. A fourth kind of joint, the "egregiously anal joint" (like the blind dovetail) is used only by the soft, and won't be treated here.

Necessary joint: Although you can make a perfectly sturdy door using dowels and Gorilla Glue, the only right way to join door members is with mortise-and-tenons. Same with chest corners. Sure, you could nail them and caulk the inside with construction adhesive, but the right way to join a chest is with dovetails.

Optional joint: Sometimes using a certain joint would be an A+ job, whereas not using it wouldn't really make the piece any less stable. An example is edge-joining boards: some people cut tongue-and-grooves in the edges; most just glue the boards together square, having observed that the glue is stronger than the wood anyway.

Decorative joint: Joints always look great; sometimes we just use them to embellish.

So the answer to the question is that I try to use the appropriate joint. I'll always use necessary joints, whereas my use of optional and decorative joints is determined by what the customer wants to pay.

Are your finishes durable, or will they turn white when my kid spills his juice on them?

For some reason I can't resist posting dumb things I've done where they can be read by people all over the world. Get this: someone once told me that a good way to age cherry is to stain it with lye. Sure enough, it works great. The only problem is that lye is a traditional paint stripper, activated by contact with moisture.  Oops.

Anyway, experience has taught me to stay away from exotic finishing methods. I mainly use polyurethane these days, which I hand rub with pumice to get that hand rubbed look. Looks great, and it's durable as anything on the market.

Do you have a showroom?

No, but our stuff is on display at Sedler's Antiques in Georgetown, MA and at Cottage Surroundings in Wolfeboro, NH, You can also come by the house (call first: 603.382.4533) if you want to see things I've made but couldn't bear to sell.

Is Harold Wyman a nice guy, or is he a pretentious ass like some woodworkers I've met?

There is indeed something about cabinetmaking that can awaken a person's inner prig; nobody knows just why. A quick survey conducted by this site indicates that Harold is a decent enough fellow, though not without flaws.

You keep referring to "the soft". Aren't you soft? I mean, doesn't one have to be soft in the head to be a craftsman in the age of computer controlled machinery, and China?

Actually no one ever asks this question except me.

People sometimes express envy of my deeply authentic lifestyle, which moves me to propose some sort of lifestyle swap, starting with incomes. Then I tell them I'm living the dream of a 20 year-old; my life is exactly what I hoped it would become back in the early '70's. Or in other words, I didn't have the good sense to go to grad school while there was still time. But hey, there is something about savoring a successful design, competently wrought by one's own hands... of assuring one's self that one never sold out... of stolid self-reliance in a culture of dependendants...

Yep, no doubt about it: Harold Wyman is soft as a grape.