Woodworkers present their wares

Woodworking can break the heart.

Wood warps, it splits - often just as a piece is nearly finished that has been worked on for hours or days.

Members of the Black Butte Ranch Art Guild learned about the painstaking requirements of the craft in last month's astonishingly popular guild meeting.

The house was packed to nearly overflowing.

"This was the best-attended meeting we have ever had," said Lynda Sullivan of the guild. "We finally got the men to come out."

Four woodworkers, Jerry Bogen, Tom Fish, Paul Janssen and Bill Burkart discussed the art of woodworking and brought several samples of their work.

Bogen began by presenting his beautifully shaped furniture, including an excellent example of woodworking craftsmanship: a cherrywood bench. Bogen talked about the exotic woods he has worked with from foreign countries as well as the qualities of local woods. How well the wood is seasoned can be key, he explained.

"Most of the wood I get is already kiln dried, but if I am going to do any bending or steaming, then I get green wood, let it dry a little bit, then bend it. Moisture content is very important."

Bogen's years of work with foreign woods has paid off.

"I had to repair a trunk from Shanghai that was a couple hundred years old, made by hand, owned by a resident at the Ranch," he said. "The dovetail joints were exquisite. I had to use jeweler tools, hand tools, to take it apart so I could reconstruct it."

Woodturner Tom Fish has been working wood since he was in high school. Woodturning is when you take a piece of wood and try to find the beauty in it, Fish said, and displayed bowls he had made from maple burl and other varieties of wood.

"If you're a woodturner, you covet people's wood piles," Fish said. "I found a piece in the back roads of Bend and revisited the site over several months to catch the guy at home. When I finally caught him and asked him about buying part of the wood pile the guy looked at me as if I was crazy.

"Some wood is very expensive," Fish added. "This is Spotted English Beech. I paid $180 for this piece of wood, but I got four bowls out of it."

Janssen, a collector of antique tools, displayed dozens of old tools from his collection and passed them around for the audience to enjoy. "I took a class in manual arts in the '50s, and that got me interested."

Really old tools were hand made, Janssen explained, with the Japanese tools among his favorite. He brought an extremely thick plane blade that was twice as thick as any U.S. plane blade he has. It's sturdy and doesn't wobble. "Old Japanese tools are better construction and steel than what is made today. They're made very well, not very pretty. They're made for utility."

Burkart is the carver of the group.

"I am very much a niche planer. I strictly do carving," Burkart said, "primarily in the flat. I got into this about seven years ago. I don't have a big shop.

"It takes a lot of precision and accuracy to do lettering," Burkart explained. "There is an art and science to it. The placement of letters, in particular the placement of particular letters next to other letters, and the spacing is quite a bit of science. It has to look natural to your eye."

And as to that warping and cracking... wood is wood, a wood worker will tell you. Professional, hobbyist, no matter how skilled you are, no matter how careful, you'll lose some of your best work to the vagaries of the medium. Which makes a beautiful, finished piece all the more precious.